The errors they are difficult to recognize if they are committed. Much easier to stigmatize them if someone else is responsible. Yet, making mistakes is not only human, it can also be useful for learning something new, about yourself and the world. Science is there to prove it: far from infallible, research is full of errors which, far from representing a failure, have actually led to great progress in knowledge. And a review of scientific mistakes (and blunders), harbingers of new discoveries, is the one contained in Memorable mistake stories (Laterza), now in bookstores and signed by Piero Martin, full professor of experimental physics at the University of Padua.
The physicist Piero Martin: “Give me 7 numbers and I’ll tell you about the Universe”
by Luca Fraioli
Recalling the “blunders” of scientists (even great ones like Einstein and Fermi) allows Martin to narrate already known events in an original way: from the discovery of DNA double helix to the birth of the myth of the Martians. But the praise of scientific error, in Piero Martin’s intentions, also helps us to be more indulgent with ourselves and with those around us; if geniuses like Fermi and champions like Antonio Cabrini made a mistake…
Professor Martin, what does the full-back of the national team that won the 1982 World Cup with the Nobel Prize for Physics have to do with it?
«They are two great champions who made, in front of a huge audience and on the occasion of a lifetime, two mistakes that ended well. Cabrini missed the penalty in the final against Germany. Then, as we know, it ended well anyway. Fermi instead held one in Stockholm Master’s lesson on the occasion of the Nobel Prize in 1938, for having developed a technique for the study of atomic nuclei using slow neutrons. But among the many results obtained with this technique, he believed he had revealed chemical elements heavier than uranium, unknown at the time. In reality he had observed, without knowing it, the fission of the atomic nucleus. When he understood it, he recognized the mistake and corrected the text of the lecture he had given in Stockholm.”
In what sense can error have a positive role, in science as in life, or on a football pitch?
«I prefer to have people answer Karl Popper, according to which “avoiding errors is a petty ideal: if we do not dare to face problems that are so difficult as to make error almost inevitable, there will be no development of knowledge”. Furthermore, science teaches us that if we want to make progress, in any field, we must be left free to make mistakes. And then the principle of authority does not apply: you are not right because you occupy a certain role, but because you exhibit facts that prove your thesis.”
Even Albert Einstein, the genius par excellence, made a mistake?
«He was wrong too. And in a way you were wrong twice on the same topic. He writes the theory of General Relativity, in a context in which the universe is considered static. But from his theory emerges a universe in movement, which expands. And then Einstein introduces a “correction” to the theory, the cosmological constant. But shortly thereafter it is demonstrated that the universe is expanding: the father of Relativity admits the error and removes the correction. At the end of the 1990s, however, it was understood that the cosmos not only expands, but does so at an increasing speed: to describe this phenomenon there is a need to reintroduce a cosmological constant into Einstein’s theory.”
There are mistakes that lead to new discoveries. But also errors that delude the illusion that we are faced with a revolutionary discovery and then reveal themselves for what they are: a faulty connector, as in the case, cited in the book, of the “faster than light” neutrinos fired from CERN in Geneva and detected below the Gran Sasso. Do both these types of errors have the same pedagogical value?
«They are both inevitable moments for knowledge. Even in the story of superfast neutrinos, for example, the community of physicists has demonstrated the great strength of science, which consists in searching for errors with great intellectual honesty and then recognizing them.”
Are there errors due to the fact that scientists become “attached” to a theory and end up not “seeing” the facts and data that disprove it?
«I cite the case of Giovanni Battista Riccioli, a Jesuit-scientist who was born about thirty years after Galileo and carried out crucial experiments to prove Galileo’s theories. At a certain point he theorizes what would later be the Coriolis effect, a plastic demonstration that the Earth rotates around the Sun. However, Riccioli is so tied to his geocentric vision that he is unable to take the final step.”
Could the scientific errors that you describe be at the basis of the growing distrust in research on the part of a section of society?
«I fear that this does not depend on the errors of science, but on having become unaccustomed to the effort of learning. There is increasingly a lack of awareness that knowledge, that of the scientist, like that of the craftsman, requires effort.”
How did you come up with this idea of describing science starting from errors?
«Maybe because I’ve done so many in my life. But beyond science, this book is an attempt to re-evaluate error in all areas: it is inevitable and we need to know how to live with it. Let’s give ourselves and give, especially to the younger ones, the chance to make mistakes. We will learn something anyway.”
The book
Memorable mistake stories by Piero Martin (Laterza, 180 pages, 18 euros)
#physicist #Piero #Martin #err #human #fact
– 2024-04-13 10:15:44
