Even geniuses make mistakes

David Milsted — Fri, 18 Aug 1995 23:00:00 +0000

NEARLY two years ago New �Ӱ�ԭ�� was kind enough to publish my letter soliciting help in compiling a book of “regrettable quotations” – expert and authoritative pronouncements which, sooner or later, turned out to be magnificently wrong (Letters, 9 October 1993). For once it is no exaggeration to say that the response from readers was tremendous. Day after day and for several months afterwards letters arrived from Britain, the Netherlands, Canada, Israel and New Zealand … literally all over the world. Thanks to these and other contributions, science and technology account for a fifth of the completed book.

And what a haul – enough to prove several times over the truth of Arthur C. Clarke’s dictum of 1962: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is almost certainly wrong.”

Take for example the British physicist Lord Kelvin, one of the foremost and most innovative scientists of his generation, a man unafraid to take repeated risks of imagination and endeavour. Yet, raised to the empyrean of the presidency of the Royal Society towards the end of the last century, he destined himself for regrettable immortality with his confident assertions that “X-rays will prove to be a hoax” and “radio has no future”. He also fired off a memorable telegram to the Niagara Falls Power Company: “Trust you will avoid gigantic mistake of adoption of alternating current.” Thanks largely to him, the official residences of Britain’s Royal Family were until quite recently powered by the much more dangerous direct current.

The telegram was a piece of comradely prejudice, written in support of the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison, a man who suffered a similar sort of sclerosis. Edison, however, may also have been defending his commercial territory. He had invested heavily in DC and used every ploy he could think of to denigrate the AC system developed by the Yugoslavian electrical engineer Nikola Tesla. Although himself once a victim of regrettable prejudice – in 1878 Sir William Preece, engineer-in-chief at the Post Office, declared that “sub-division of the electric light is an absolute ignis fatuus” – Edison wrote in 1889: “There is no plea which will justify the use of high-tension and alternating current, either in a scientific or in a commercial sense … My personal desire would be to prohibit entirely the use of alternating currents. They are as unnecessary as they are dangerous.”

In 1912, with his assertion that “direct thought is not an attribute of femininity”, Edison took up permanent residence in the Regrettable Pantheon. He is in very distinguished scientific company. Over there, by the potted palm, is the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, saying “I can accept the theory of relativity as little as I can accept the existence of atoms and other such dogma” (1913). And there’s Lord Richie Calder: “That is how the atom is split, but what does it mean? To us who think in terms of practical use it means nothing!” (1932). The great New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford himself (“Anyone who looks for a source of power in the transformation of the atom is talking absolute moonshine”) is hovering behind a pillar, while Albert Einstein (“There is not the slightest indication that energy will ever be obtainable [from the atom]”) is serving drinks.

It’s quite a crowd. Thomas Bell, president of the Linnean Society, gains entry with his report that 1858 (the year Charles Darwin read his background papers for On the Origin of Species to the society) “has not, indeed, been marked by any of those discoveries which at once revolutionise, so to speak, the department of science in which they occur”. Another member is the British geologist Sir John Dawson, who declared in Origin of the World (1877): “Man has gained nothing of moment from the dawn of history. Man’s earliest state was his best.” The Russian agriculturalists Ivan Michurin and Trofim Lysenko, who refused to accept the existence of genes and believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, are here, as is the unreconstructed Stalinist V.V. Beloussov who thought (1979) that “something will certainly remain after the theory of plate tectonics goes. Let us keep our minds open …” Yes, or even empty.

Perhaps the noisiest table in this Valhalla is set aside for all the distinguished people who saw no future in heavier-than-air flight or rocket technology. And – surprise, surprise – here is Edison again: “It is apparent to me that the possibilities of the aeroplane … have been exhausted” (1895). Then Canadian astronomer Simon Newcomb, discoverer of Neptune, drowns him out with: “Aerial flight is one of that class of problems with which men will never have to cope” (1903). And as for rockets … Clarke, writing in Seventies �Ӱ�ԭ��, a supplement to the 20/27 December 1979 issue of New �Ӱ�ԭ��, found one Professor A. W. Bickerton of Christchurch, New Zealand, guilty of “arrogant ignorance” for his crushing observation in the 1920s that the weight of fuel needed to lift a rocket through the atmosphere could never be carried into space (of course it wouldn’t have to be) and that “our most violent explosive, nitroglycerine, could not produce enough energy to do the job anyway”. A much more explosive kerosene-oxygen mixture had been developed years earlier by the very people Bickerton was decrying. And then of course there was our very own Astronomer Royal, Richard van der Riet Woolley, who said: “Space travel is utter bilge.” That was in 1956 – the year before the first Sputnik.

Clarke identified the two failings of the Bickertons of this world as “failures of the nerve and failures of imagination”. Such failings become culpable when they are committed in the face of relevant facts: when the prophet ought to have known better. It is then that such errors become “regrettable” – and it is these, more than 1300 from all walks of life, that I have collected.

I have my favourites, of course. I still giggle when I come across the last words of General Sedgwick in 1864: “Nonsense, man! They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist …”. And I shudder at this 1935 utterance of Joseph Stalin: “Gaiety is the outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.”

But in the pantheon of science, my choice as president of the regrettable immortals has to be the astronomer Francisco Sizzi who, in 1610, gave us this outstanding application of the “robust anthropic principle”: “Jupiter’s moons are invisible to the naked eye and therefore can have no influence on the Earth, and therefore would be useless, and therefore do not exist.”

Sizzi, surely, is the sort of scientist the British biologist Thomas Huxley had in mind when he wrote: “Next to being right in this world, the best of all things is to be clearly and definitely wrong.” Denigrators of cold fusion may do well to note these comforting words.

David Milsted, Author at New �Ӱ�ԭ��

Even geniuses make mistakes