How did Albert Einstein not make even ONE mistake in his whole life as a physicist!? Please help!?

Question

His creative mind helped him develop General Relativity. His creative mind helped start the study of black holes. His creative mind helped him to become the smartest scientist/thinker of all time.

HOW DID A PERSON AS SMART AS EINSTEIN NEVER MADE ONE MISTAKE HIS ENTIRE LIFE AS A PHYSICIST!?!?!

Answer 1

Have you heard of the quote, "Everyone makes mistakes; and eventually learn from it?" Well, that was Einstein. I think what you mean is..



1. He made mistakes, but since his brain is very functional, he learns from his mistakes real quick.



2. Not ALL physicists will ever be as smart as Einstein or Newton. The documentaries you saw are not his mistakes. They wouldn't want to put mistakes in his documentaries. Not to mention the fact that they had no technology so they used their brain 24/7 while the people today like you and me have computers to help our brains and not tire our brain so much like Einstein did.



The biggest mistake he made was the Cosmological Constant. And remember his quote he said over and over again? "God does not play dice." He struggled with Quantum Mechanics. That tells you something. Einstein struggled in a lot of fields, but he only focuses on well over a couple of fields.

Answer 2

This is my response to your earlier similar question, which was deleted:



I think your perception is shaded by your (perhaps justifiable) admiration for your father. Einstein and Newton made plenty of mistakes. In fact, Einstein made it clear when he discovered one of his own big errors - the cosmological constant that he included within General Relativity.



I am not a physicist. My background is aerospace engineering. Clearly, mistakes are not allowed in that field of endeavor. But engineers are just as human as anyone. How do we make sure that those mistakes don't get into flying aircraft? The answer is not intelligence. It is not how smart you are that counts. The secret is in the hard work that you and others do to check your results, test them against reality, and correct them as necessary. Certainly, guys like Newton and Einstein were geniuses; they thought of new things that nobody else could have. But Einstein's initial prediction of the angular displacement of the stars during a solar eclipse were wrong. The fact is that the first attempts to verify his predictions were made during solar eclipses in 1912 and 1914. Those attempts - using the wrong numbers - were prevented by poor weather and by war. If they had succeeded, Einstein would have been rejected. But he went back and checked his numbers, and corrected them prior to the 1919 eclipse, when in fact the observations finally were made, and his corrected efforts were vindicated at that time. The final good results were not because he was so smart - but because he worked hard and corrected his own mistakes.



Scientists, engineers, professionals in all fields - are just people. They all make mistakes. The ones that excel are the ones that work hard to correct their mistakes.

Answer 3

Einstein was a very great scientist and thinker, but more than that, he was very much a human being. Outside of his exceptional insights into the nature of the universe, his life was pretty much like anyone else's.



(".... By his own admission, he did not treat his two wife's well, as he had a long history of extramarital affairs. He had many close and lasting friends, but the challenge of personal moral responsibility was often too much to bear. ....



... his first loves; his illegitimate daughter, Lieserl; his marriage to fellow physics student Mileva Maric, Lieserl's mother (It is believed that Einstein and Maric gave Lieserl up for adoption when she was but still very young).



There is some evidence that Einstein was now paying the price for not showing enough respect to his teach Weber, who might well have been writing behind Einstein's back to torpedo his applications.



Albert and Mileva finally divorced in 1919, and Albert married Elsa (his first cousin) shortly thereafter. .... Not all was domestic bliss, however. More than a few women were drawn to Einstein, and he indulged in a number of no-so-secret extramarital affairs. Elsa, the realist, made her peace with Einstein's philandering, perhaps seeing this as the price of marriage to a famous man.



Second son, Edward, admitted for the first time to Burgholzli asylum in Burgholzli, Switzerland, for treatment of psychiatric problems.")



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There more, much more but these shortcomings were, in many ways, understandable given the extraordinary nature of the man. He was not a very good father or husband, and that was his greatest blunder, I think. However, the legacy he left behind far out reaches these social errors. He was after all, only human.

-----------------------

Do not strive to be another Einstein, but use his achievments as a model for your own life. You, have to be you. Not Einstein.



See: Albert Einstein: Physicist, Philosopher, Humanitarian

http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/CourseDescLong2.aspx?cid=8122



Also see: EINSTEIN: His Life and Universe

by Walter Isaacson

ISBN: 13-978-7432-6473-0

Answer 4

I'm not sure where you heard that, but it is not true that he never made any mistakes.



He was a smart man and was an important person in the scientific community, but it's actually shame that people would rather reflect on the wonder of this one guy as a super human rather than learn about any of the hundreds of other contributors to science that are at least as important.



The best advice I can give you is if you remember the source of your information, make sure to be more critical of anything else you hear from that source and you will be better off.

Answer 5

Frankly, if you consider yourself a physicist you should know the answer to this question already. I'm not a physicists and yet I know that Einstein was wrong on a number of thngs, most notably quantum mechanics. He lost a very public debate with Niels Bohr. If you are studying physics and don't know that, then I would seriously consider alternative subject matters.

Answer 6

Do you really want to be Einstein that much? Then why don't you go practice your problems a bit more?



Listen, that guy had crap grades in school because he couldn't focus on what he was supposed to do. Sure, his thoughts were a little deeper, and probably majority of the time stupider as well, but that doesnt mean he was any better in the late 1800s. If he were given a toy, he probably would've wondered what kind of person had the idea for whatever that toy was.



Though I probably would've liked to hang around such a person. Anyway, people are different. Just do what you like doing, and make it your profession. Unless it's mopping floors. But again, do what you like.



And it generally doesnt help to compare someone in their... well, younger thirty to someone who's face or name is synonymous to genius. Probably not going to be much of a comparison to make. But there's no reason why you can't become as good as Einstein. He screwed up kindergarten, and that word comes from his own language! Not that that the language thing actually means anything.

Answer 7

This Site Might Help You.



RE:

How did Albert Einstein not make even ONE mistake in his whole life as a physicist!? Please help!?

His creative mind helped him develop General Relativity. His creative mind helped start the study of black holes. His creative mind helped him to become the smartest scientist/thinker of all time.



HOW DID A PERSON AS SMART AS EINSTEIN NEVER MADE ONE MISTAKE HIS ENTIRE LIFE AS A PHYSICIST!?!?!

Answer 8

Putting aside all the comments about the Cosmological Constant, or his rejection of quantum physics, think about what he actually DID.



He took roughly 10 years to come up with General Relativity. How do you think he did that? Do you think he woke up once a month with one more piece of the puzzle? No, he thought about the problems day after day, searching for the answers. Have you even done that? You think of a possible solution, you test it in some way, and if it's wrong, you throw it out. The test might be very simple ("no, that won't work"), or it might take months of brain numbing calculation to determine it's a wrong path. THAT'S why it took him 10 years, not because he was infallible, but BECAUSE he made mistakes. That's the only way to solve problems, not by being perfect.



Surely you've heard the old adage about Thomas Edison? When a reporter was told by Edison that they had tried over 10,000 items before hitting upon the correct filament for the lightbulb, he asked him how it felt to be wrong that many times? "Wrong?", said Edison, "we weren't wrong, we simply found the 10,000 things that DON'T work".

Answer 9

Well, I don't think anyone ever goes without making a mistake. For example, Einstein proposed the "Cosmological Constant" to correct for "missing mass" in space, but then decided it was an error. So either he was wrong at first or wrong later (as some have suggested the CC is needed to balance the equations of the universe).

Answer 10

When we look back on history from the present, one could consider a single theory of all religions may astonishes those past Seers and Knowers by its naive overconfidence of such a thought process. Thoughtful observers of today are inclined to be far more modest about such thoughts of wisdom. Impressive books have been written just to explain one belief of one religion or compare a singular feature of a specific custom or ritual of one religion which has something similar in another religion. As our libraries bulge with knowledge of wisdom thoughts we may even have surpassed Alexanders famous warehouse of knowledge that has been lost to the world by vandals past. Lets hope that this doesn't happen again.

Answer 11

he did make mistakes and even admitted that he had done so. back when it was not known that the galaxies were all moving away from each other, people believed that gravitation should pull them together and the universe should collapse. but since that was not happening he came up with the cosmological constant that worked as a kinda anti-gravity to keep the universe expended. When it was discovered that all matter in the universe was moving away from each other, he is quoted as saying that the cosmological constant was his biggest mistake.



Aside from that he also worked on the possibility of cold fusion that proved to be incorrect.

Answer 12

I'm sure Einstein made many mistakes in his life. He was very human. But he's famous because of his tremendous insights into physics, not for his mistakes.

Answer 13

He did make mistakes. Indeed he described the cosmological constant as his biggest mistake in that he did not follow the logic that his equations were suggesting. He realised that the Universe should collapse in on itself, and so created an artificial fuzz factor so his equation matched what he thought was reality. Then Edwin Hubble showed the Universe was expanding which negated the need for such a constant.

Answer 14

He did make a lot of mistakes. That is how we all learn.



The story you saw showed all his published works. Most people only publish their successes, not their mistakes.



It took Einstein years to get his Theory of Relativity correct.



Hummm, theoritical bloopers. Probably not a best seller.

Answer 15

As smart as he was, remember he worked mostly in the first half of the 20th century. The general knowledge in the field of physics grows and progresses incredibly fast, so many widely-accepted theories are considered obsolete ten or twenty years later. Einstein worked with what he had, what humans were capable of knowing, and he did an incredible job with it. Even though some of his work has been disproven, his contribution to physics and to human knowledge is enormous, and we would be nowhere near where we are today without him.

Answer 16

Of course he made mistakes. I suppose the documentaries you've seen didn't focus on them. Normally such things focus on accomplishments.



If you are ever giving a talk on something and a host introduces you, do you think they'll give a list of accomplishments or a list of mistakes?

Answer 17

THIS IS PATENTLY FALSE.



Einstein himself said that: "my greatest blunder was the Cosmological Constant".



That was a HUGE MISTAKE, and Einstein openly admitted it.



He also rejected much of quantum theory in later life, which is another huge mistake (albeit one that he did not explicitly admit to).

Answer 18

my english teacher told me he failed tenth grade math, so I take it he must've. even though the way we talk about einstein makes him seem like he's some kind of superhuman, he was really just a guy that had great outcomes from failures. That how every good scientist. Plus, as much as you dont want to believe this, it's true that you learn from your mistakes. Since einstein's made TONS of discoveries, imagine just how many MORE mistakes he had to make to MAKE those discoveries. so from a certain point of view, he was a genius because of his-- to some extent-- stupidity. :)

hope this helps!

-annie xoxoxoxoxoxox

Answer 19

Einstein and Newton made plenty of mistakes during their careers. Their triumphs and important additions to modern physics overshadowed their mistakes.

Answer 20

he made plenty of mistakes, but he kept trying, so he's mostly remembered for his successes. for example he spent about ten years (1905-1915) developing general relativity. that was not smooth sailing I'll bet!

Answer 21

Wasn't there something about his belief in a static universe? He called it his greatest blunder?

Answer 22

he made a blunder associated with the expansion of the universe, some type of cosmological constant that he later retracted.

Answer 23

He did



I don't know what you are talking about...

Answer 24

What docs did you watch? Did they mention his failed marriage?