Einstein’s Greatest Mistakes: 1st Anniversary Special Post!!!

Well…Einstein…we all know about him!!!

His contribution in physics was so great and influential that it is directly responsible for the creation of a completely new field in physics. He helped us to solve problems like mercury’s orbit and his theory of relativity helped us to understand black holes. For his theory of relativity, today we all are enjoying various services from the satellites. Well, if that’s not enough….his joint paper with Satyandra Nath Bose, the Bose-Einstein Statistics directly helped in the creation of today’s Quantum Mechanics. And consequently, he became the Time's Person of the Century for the 20^th century.

It’s hard to imagine that such a person made some serious mistakes in his field but, as they said “Facts are Stranger than Fiction” and this case is not an exception. So, are you ready to dig into this???

Well, before starting, I want to thank everybody who consistently visited my blog and gave their valuable suggestion to me to improve this blog. For the last 1 year, I am just trying to enrich the knowledge of people without any cost. The motto, target and enthusiasm is still the same as it was in day 1 and it will remain the same for coming years!!!

So, let’s dig into this article….

1) Adding Cosmological constant (Λ):

This was a great mistake. The gravity of this was so much great that the Einstein himself referred this as his greatest mistake. Initially, Einstein thought that the universe was static and unchanging. But, his equations constantly showing that it wasn’t. To rectify this error (which is actually correct), Einstein added cosmological constant in his equation of relativity. This rectification was unstable anyways as a slightly denser region than the normal would collapse and slightly less dense region would expand. That means everything should be perfect.

If Einstein didn’t add that constant then he would predict the expansion of the universe before Friedman and Lamaitre and before Hubble found the evidence of it.

Later, Einstein rectify his mistake and removed the cosmological constant from the equation.

2) Accepting Gravitational Waves:

Illustration of Gravitational Waves

Although, Einstein predicted the gravitational waves in 1916 but he believed that they would be incredibly hard to measure and also doubted the existence of the black holes that may be causing them.

But, scientists of LIGO detected gravitational waves successfully for the first time in 2015, about 100 years after Einstein’s prediction.

3) Rejecting Quantum Mechanical model:

Einstein contributed significantly in the field of quantum mechanics by developing theories like the photoelectric effect and developing mathematical structure like Bose-Einstein statistics. Even Einstein won Nobel Prize for photoelectric effect.

But Einstein didn’t liked the concepts of the quantum world. He called the ‘Quantum Entanglement’ as ‘Spooky Force’. Moreover, he also rejected the idea of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle. He believed in a deterministic nature where everything can be pre-calculated, which was not the case with the Quantum world.

4) Einstein’s wrong approach to find Unification theory:

Unification theory or Grand Unification Theory is theory by which all of the forces and phenomena of nature can be explained by using few simple rules, equations and parameters.

For example, Maxwell’s law unifies both Electric and magnetic forces and forms Electromagnetism.

Ever-since, we all are trying to unify all those forces and Einstein was no exception.

In the last years of his life, he tried to unify electromagnetism and gravitation. Many experiments revealed various new rules but, Einstein ignored all those. Even it was also showed that the strong nuclear force can be unified with Electromagnetism and weak force. This unification can be seen in the current Standard Model. But, Einstein decided to stick with gravity and electromagnetism and try to unify those without using new rules which results in failure.

Today, the scenario changed. Grand unified theory now can be explained by various theories like String theory. But, still, those are yet to be proven.

5) Einstein simple mistake in the derivation of E=mc^2:

After reading this heading, you probably thinking that I have lost my mind. But believe me, I haven’t …..

It is absolutely correct that Einstein derived E= mc^2. But, the strange truth is that he derived it for only rest particle only. In other words, you can say that his derivation meant for frame-dependent observation only. It is hard to believe that he did this even after setting the laws for relativistic phenomena in his Special Theory of Relativity paper.  

It wasn’t six years later, when Nobel laureate Max Von Laue showed that one must remove the idea of kinetic energy to fix this error and by this way ultimately fixing the error.

It is hard to believe that even geniuses like Einstein made some critical mistakes but, at the end we should remember that they are also humans and humans make mistakes.

At last, I again want to thank all of you who stayed and supported me for last one year. Thank you very much!!!

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See you next time!!!

                                                                      -Ratnadeep Das Choudhury

                                                      Founder and Writer of The Dynamic Frequency