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		<title>Science&#8217;s Brilliant Blunders: How Oops Moments Became Eurekas</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2013/05/17/sciences-brilliant-blunders-how-oops-moments-became-eurekas/</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 17 May 2013 11:10:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Michael D. Lemonick</dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[In 1953, the celebrated chemist Linus Pauling, already on track for a Nobel Prize for his work on chemical bonds, solved a major biochemical mystery by figuring out the structure of DNA—but his solution was utterly wrong. Later that decade, the brilliant astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, who had played a major role in discovering how new elements are forged in the core of the Sun, came up with an explanation for the expanding universe. It was known as the “steady-state” theory, and while it was ingenious, it was wrong too. In the early 1900’s Lord Kelvin, one of the founders of thermodynamics, calculated the age of the Earth at 98 million years. He was off by a factor of 45 or so. Each of these world-class scientists made whopping mistakes — and as the astrophysicist Mario Livio shows in his deeply researched and compellingly written new book Brilliant Blunders (Simon &#38; Schuster), they weren’t alone. Darwin and Einstein, too, made significant errors. “Most people imagine that these great luminaries couldn’t possibly make mistakes,” says Livio, who holds a position at the Space Telescope Science Institute. But they did. Some of the bloopers were perfectly understandable based on what was known at the time. Darwin, for example, like many of his contemporaries, assumed that the characteristics of two parents were “blended” in their offspring, “as in the mixing of paints,” writes Livio. Fair enough, given that the existence of genes wasn’t known at the time—except that after a few generations, the contribution of a great-grandparent or a great-great would have been so diluted that none of that ancestor’s genetic material would have been detectable in the descendants. Yet natural selection was supposed to work by having beneficial characteristics reinforced, not diluted. Oops. (MORE: The Mysteries of Bubbles—and Clouds Too) Other mistakes were based on a certainty bordering on arrogance. Pauling had been so successful at explaining chemical bonds and deducing the structures of proteins that he evidently became overconfident: “His model of DNA,” says Livio, “had the wrong number of strands, and<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=15280&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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		<title>A Guidebook to the Universe — and to Ourselves</title>
		<link>http://science.time.com/2012/11/23/a-guidebook-to-the-universe-and-to-ourselves/</link>
		<comments>http://science.time.com/2012/11/23/a-guidebook-to-the-universe-and-to-ourselves/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 23 Nov 2012 10:45:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Michael Lemonick</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[I have to admit that when I first heard that a new book was on the way titled The Universe Within: From Quantum to Cosmos, my first reaction was somewhat uncharitable, along the lines of the famous “Who ordered this?” — a line uttered by the physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi when he was confronted with evidence for an unexpected and slightly unwelcome new particle. The idea of a physicist explaining the universe to the rest of us wasn’t a new concept when Stephen Hawking wrote A Brief History of Time back in 1988, and it’s been done over and over since then. Do we really need yet another bite out of this chewed-over apple? It turns out we do, because Neil Turok wrote it. Turok, the director of Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, has been thinking outside the box of conventional physics for most of his career, which has included top-tier professorships at Princeton and the University of Cambridge. He has co-authored a theory that would eliminate the need for a Big Bang, for example, and thus for an answer to the brain-straining question of what was going on before time began — and unlike virtually all other attacks on the Big Bang theory, this one is taken seriously by mainstream cosmologists. The story of physics from Pythagoras to Dark Energy and everything in between has been told a million times, but it feels refreshing and new when Turok tells it. (More: Time Talks to the Physicists Who Found the Higgs) One reason is that along with his clear and eloquent explanations of quantum theory and other inherently murky topics, Turok also takes on issues that are usually left unaddressed in books of this kind — issues of the scientist’s obligations to the rest of humanity. “Physicists and engineers,” he told me in a recent conversation, “often have no serious exposure to history, to questions of society, to literature. They’re trained simply as technical experts.” For Turok, that’s not good enough. “I wanted to explore what science means for who<img alt="" border="0" src="http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=science.time.com&#038;blog=13785469&#038;post=11774&#038;subd=timeecocentric&#038;ref=&#038;feed=1" width="1" height="1" />]]></description>
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