On the importance of error in science

When most people think about the way science progresses, they don't usually think about the failures along the way

Most people have some image in their head about how scientific discoveries are made. For example, the classic image of a scientist scribbling formulas in white chalk on a green board, or the mad scientist in the lab, and her body lying on the bed with lots of electrodes and lightning... sometimes it works like that, and sometimes it doesn't.

However, when most people think about the way science progresses, they don't usually think about the failures along the way. And it's quite strange, because it's clear that not all the experiments in the laboratory will be successful, and all the ideas on the chalkboard will be correct - perhaps it would be more correct to say that most of the ideas and most of the experiments are not successful, failures.

I remember a documentary about the way they came to the solution of a mathematical problem, Fermat's last theorem, a problem that had not been solved for three hundred years. There was a Japanese scientist who worked on a theory related to this, and I remember what his friend said about him - "He would make a lot of mistakes, but he had the talent to always err in the right direction." And there is much more wisdom in this sentence than we might think at first glance: a scientist who investigates something that has not been investigated yet, treads on an unmarked path, and it is very easy to get off the path and get lost.

And even the greatest geniuses can be wrong. For example, Einstein is mostly famous for his theory of relativity, but he published several other groundbreaking articles in other fields of physics - for example, calculating the size of atoms and molecules, and also proving that light sometimes behaves like a stream of particles. A particle is, in this sense, a quanta - so Einstein is also one of the fathers

The quantum theory

But when Einstein encountered some of the strange predictions that quantum theory entails, he refused to accept them. For example, one of the results of this theory says that there are things that cannot be measured perfectly: if you know the speed of a particle, for example, you cannot know with certainty its position. In other words, there is some basic randomness in nature. Einstein did not agree to accept this, he said 'God does not play dice'. And he was convinced that it couldn't be, until Max Planck once told him, "Einstein, stop telling God what to do." But Einstein was wrong, and this theory is ultimately correct.

Even the physicist Stephen Hawking, who became famous for his groundbreaking research into the possibility of the existence of 'black holes' in space - but he also knew that he could be wrong. His own theory said that it is impossible to see black holes in a normal telescope, because light is unable to escape from them to reach us - so in principle, his whole theory could have been a collection of nonsense that can never be proven.

So as 'insurance', in case he was wrong, he bet with his friend that blacks don't exist (against his own theory). If black holes don't exist, he'll get a baseball magazine, and if they do, he'll buy his friend a subscription to Penthouse magazine. So if he was wrong about the black holes, at least he earned a magazine about baseball...

It would be very true to say that the way science progresses is through errors. Scientists gather information from experiments and observations, create theories and then try to predict future events using these theories.

When this future event arrives, or a suitable experiment is carried out, we check if the theory is correct: if so, it remains, and if not, it's time to look for another one.

Every theory, and it doesn't matter how important the theory is or who invented it or how long it has been true in the past - every theory stands to be tested at any given moment. For example, there was once a concept in science called the 'ether'. The ether was a transparent, imperceptible substance that fills all the space around it so that a vacuum (void) is impossible: wherever there is a vacuum, the ether quickly sneaks in and fills the missing space. This theory about the ether was very old - since the days of Aristotle, the Greek philosopher who lived several hundred years BC, and it was still believed in the 19th century, two thousand years ago. A lot of time, isn't it?

But as science progressed, scientists tried to look for proof of the existence of ether. Many experiments have been planned and carried out, but none of them have been able to find any proof of the existence of this elusive substance.

Then, in the 19th century, physicists began to study light more deeply, and in a more detailed manner - to try and discover the speed of light. If we start from the assumption that the universe is full of this invisible substance, the aether, then when the earth revolves around the sun, it moves in the aether like a ship sails in the sea. If we look at it in a slightly different way, it is as if we are standing still, and the site flows around us like a river.

Now, logic says that if the light is 'swimming' in this ether stream, then when it moves 'upstream' (Za, with the direction of the Earth's movement) it should be slower, and when it swims downstream (Za, against the direction the movement of the earth)- it should be faster.

Some experiments were carried out in this direction, but they were too crude, and not accurate enough to calculate the enormous speed of light. Then two scientists came along, Michaelson and Morley, and they designed an experiment that was supposed to discover with a fairly high degree of certainty the

This change in the speed of light, if it exists. But they found nothing. As a result of this experiment and several other experiments, this idea of ​​the ether was abandoned, and this after over two thousand years in which it was very deeply rooted in scientific thinking. All that remains of it today is a phrase like 'above the airwaves' and other phrases, which are distant echoes of this scientific idea that was eventually abandoned.

So this lecture will deal with the importance of error in the development process of science. As an example, I'll give the topic I like very much, 'Perpetum Mobila.'. Short explanation - Fraptum Mobila is a machine that does not need energy to work. Think of a car that runs without gas, or a television that works without electricity. In Hebrew it is called - 'machine of constant motion': since this car does not need fuel to drive, it can drive forever, and this is the origin of the name.

At the beginning of the 18th century, in Germany, there was a guy named Orpheus. Orpheus was a talented guy: a mechanic, a watchmaker, even a bit of a doctor. Such a handyman, a man with good hands. His uncle is from Home Center. Orpheus' livelihood was to travel from city to city in Germany, and demonstrate his inventions to the public. Such a showman. If the invention was interesting, and remember that at that time there were not many sophisticated machines, then it was a certain attraction, he would set up a small workshop in the city and for several months he would sell tickets to people to see the machine up close.

Orpheus' greatest success, of all the machines he built, was a one-of-a-kind wheel. The wheel in question was very large, several meters in diameter, and weighed several hundred kilograms. Orpheus would place the wheel on a platform, then give it a slight push - and the wheel would begin to speed up to a certain rate of revolutions, something like 26 revolutions per minute. No doubt it was quite amazing that such a heavy wheel would turn at such a speed as a result of only a slight push.

But then Orpheus would do something really amazing: he would connect the wheel, through the axle, with a rope to a bucket and draw water, and lift weights
Heaviness, and all kinds of other such demonstrations, and the wheel would not stop turning. It was wonderful - everyone knows that water can be pumped with a rope and a wheel and all that, but usually, you have to keep pushing the wheel...and that's what Orpheus didn't do, except for a small push which is obviously not enough for all these actions.

So the wheel invented by Orpheus was in fact a 'machine of perpetual motion', a machine that performs work (lifts weights, pumps water, anything like that) without the need for an investment of energy. Perpetum leads.

What was Orpheus' secret? How did the wheel do what it did? we do not know. Orpheus did not reveal his secret: the wheel was wrapped in a sheet of cloth that covered almost all of it, from the center to the circumference, and hid the internal mechanism that might have given the wheel its power. Many people have tested the wheel of Orpheus - without opening the fabric cover, of course.

There was an English professor who checked to see if there was anyone hiding inside the cloth - he cut a tiny opening, dripped in hot pepper and waited to hear
If someone is coughing...no one sneezed in their face. There was a committee that did a very thorough inspection, in relation to that period - they locked the wheel in the room for two months, with a guard at the entrance to the room. The room had thick walls and was windowless, and the lock had a wax seal so that if someone broke it, it could be seen immediately. But after they opened the room, after two months or so, the wheel was still turning as a result of the push we gave two months ago, before closing the room. And yet, after all these tests, most of the public (and especially the scientists) did not believe Orpheus. There were many people who opposed Orpheus, calling him a liar and a deceiver.

The reason so many people opposed it, was that many inventors before the time of Orpheus tried to design a perpetual motion machine, already over a thousand years ago, but no one succeeded. They didn't understand why they didn't succeed, but they failed time and time again. The first recorded attempt was by an Indian astronomer, back in the year XNUMX AD - and that's just the recorded one, there must have been before him. Even Leonardo da Vinci tried to design such a machine, and after a few attempts he gave up and wrote that people who try to invent a mobile perpetum are chasing an impossible dream, like those looking for the chimera - a mythological monster with a lion's head, goat's legs and such.

So the wheel of Upreus was considered impossible. Despite this, the government wanted to collect taxes from him for the invention: the fact that it is impossible, still does not mean that the state cannot take money for it. In order not to pay the tax, Orpheus would dismantle his wheel before leaving the city - then build a new one when he settled in another city.

But wherever he presented his wheel, there were those who accused him of being a fraud, and there were those who answered that there must be some kind of spring inside the wheel... until one day one of Orpheus's maids came, and admitted that she helped him deceive everyone, and turned some spring that was attached to the wheel underneath to the floor Orpheus claimed that the maid was lying, and trying to extort money from him - in the end, there was no proof either way, but that was the smoking gun everyone was looking for. From that moment, Orpheus' career waned, and the profits from the machine waned. When Orpheus passed away, a few years later, he was quite poor - which is a shame, because whoever invents such a machine, a machine that does not need external energy to do work, can be very rich!

If someone succeeds in designing a car that does not need fuel, for example (no solar or electricity, no energy at all), think how rich he will be from all the cars he sells! Orpheus died without revealing to anyone the secret behind his wheel. To this day, almost three hundred years later, there are people trying to dig into the books he wrote to discover the secret of how his invention works.

The reason most of the public did not believe Orpheus, is that most people understand, through common sense, that there are no free meals in life.

Our day-to-day experience teaches us that there is no such thing as a car without fuel, and even a car that runs on electricity needs electricity to work. Even the Beatles said in one of their songs - "In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make". This is how it is in life: there is such symmetry. To get something you have to give something. And even if it's a cart pulled by a horse, someone has to feed the horse.

This principle, which we learn as part of our life experience, is known in scientific language as the 'principle of conservation of energy'. Now we will enter a bit into the field called 'thermodynamics'. Do not panic. A scientist named Boltzmann studied him in depth - he committed suicide in 1906. He was followed by Paul Arnfest, and he committed suicide in 1933. So I think we should approach this matter carefully. Let's understand a little better what the scientists mean by the 'law of conservation of energy'.

I will give an example here that is based on an example that Richard Feynman gave at the time in a lecture he gave on the conservation of energy. If to imitate, then imitate the best, and Feynman was a proven genius. Said and you are sitting in an authentic oriental restaurant. The owner of the restaurant comes and asks what you want to order, you tell him - hummus, chips and salad. You eat, and at the end the bill arrives, fifty shekels. You received something from him, you must return it. The next day you arrive at the same restaurant, same table, same menu. Everything is the same, exactly! You order hummus, chips and salad. Abu Rami brings the food, you eat...at the end the bill comes. This time forty-five shekels came out. You are satisfied! You gave less than you received. Has the apparent symmetry been broken? Are there free meals? No. On closer inspection it turns out that the cook was a little hungry, and you got less fries than yesterday, so the restaurant owner reduced the bill. You have not earned anything.

The next day you eat again, everything is the same. This time the bill came out to fifty-five shekels. Ah! Maybe you gave more than you got? No, upon examination it turns out that the waiter confused the owner of the restaurant, and he was confused in the calculation of the bill - I mean, the experiment was not accurate, you could say. Symmetry is maintained. The next day the same. Hummus, chips and salad. The bill is fifty shekels - but you check the plate and see that there is schnitzel in addition! Everything is checked well, there are no mistakes... the owner of the restaurant is fine, the cook is fine, everything is fine..

Ah-ha! So maybe there are free meals! But then you think twice, and you remember that you went to the bathroom for a second, and next to you was a child with a schnitzel on a plate, and he didn't want to eat it even though his mother insisted... you have no way to be XNUMX percent sure that this schnitzel didn't suddenly 'pop' up on its own, just like that- But it is very, very likely that the child put the schnitzel on your plate.

This is also the principle of the law of conservation of energy. There is some amount of something indeterminate, some 'energy', that seems to always be conserved, and you always have to give energy to get something back. And even if sometimes, as in the example of the restaurant, it seems that energy suddenly emerges from nothing, like the schnitzel on the plate - this is always an error, or an inaccuracy in the experiment, or some other unknown phenomenon.

The scientists understood this, intuitively, back in the 18th century but it took them a while to grasp that this is a basic principle of nature, that energy is conserved in any situation and everywhere and that there is apparently no way to circumvent this law. The first person who came up with the idea was actually a doctor. It was Julius Meyer, towards the middle of the 19th century. Julius was the ship's doctor on a merchant ship that sailed in the tropics of the equator, and according to the accepted medical concept at the time, he would do a lot of blood transfusions for the sailors on the ship. Letting blood was then considered a good treatment against all kinds of diseases and pains. Julius knew, as a doctor, that the blood in the body contains oxygen and that this oxygen is part of the process of burning food for energy that keeps the body at a constant temperature.

In Europe, Julius knew from experience that the blood that reaches the organs in the body is a bright red color - meaning, rich in oxygen - and when the blood that leaves the organs in the body, its color is bluish purple, because it does not have much oxygen. The oxygen was lost in the process of converting food into energy.

As he drained the blood of one of the sailors, he noticed to his surprise that the blood remained more or less the same color, bright red, throughout. He checked all the salts, and they were all the same.

Julius thought about this, and gained a very important insight: the blood remained the same color, because the body did not have to use much oxygen to use it to produce a lot of energy from food. and why so? Because it's hot outside, there's a lot of sun. The important point here is that the energy from the sun is the same energy in food, just in a different form. There is a connection between these different forms of energy - when there is more energy from the sun, less energy is needed from food.

When you look at the whole picture, you suddenly realize that energy has many forms - energy from the sun, and energy from food, and energy of the spring, and energy of the movement, and energy of the magnet... and all of them are actually the same thing, and the energy is not lost, it just replaces

Costume...you release a spring with a dumbbell, and the energy that was stored in the spring becomes the energy of the movement of the dumbbell.

Unfortunately for Julius he was a doctor, not a physicist. He didn't know how to explain his ideas in the 'physical language', and the physicists despised him because he wasn't one of their own... in short, his idea was pretty much forgotten. Julius became depressed, was admitted to a psychiatric hospital... It took several years before the scientific community recognized his achievement, and he received the credit he deserved. He was awarded a German knighthood, 'Von' - Julius von Mayer.

The one who formulated the law of conservation of energy officially, after actually rediscovering it, was Herman Helmholtz. He himself is a doctor like Mayer, but an excellent physicist who also knew how to present his ideas in language and terms that the other physicists understood. Helmholtz said that 'energy is not created out of nothing', but he could not prove it, because it cannot be proven. Energy is something abstract, not real, not something that can be counted or put in a pile or looked at under a microscope. It's a mathematical idea. So Helmholtz said that the law of conservation of energy is true because a machine of perpetual motion, a leading perpetum like that of Orpheus and all those thousands of men before him, is impossible.

So here you understand the importance of Perpetum Mobila, and the importance of the investment of all those thousands of inventors who tried to do the impossible. Because they tried in so many ways to invent a leading perpetum, and failed, only because of this Helmholtz could afford to say with such confidence that the law of conservation of energy is an iron principle, an axiom of nature. Without the errors and deception of these inventors, the law of conservation of energy could not have been established as true.

To strengthen the claim that mistakes have a real contribution to science - we will take alchemy as another example. The alchemists, as some of you may have heard, tried to turn metals into gold. The motive was, of course, economic - to take a cheap metal like iron and turn it into a precious metal, gold. No one really knew how to turn plain metal into gold, so lots of methods were tried. Mixing materials, melting and cooling and then melting again, crushing material into dust, dissolving in water, and every idea imaginable, including performing complicated rituals in the light of a full moon with fairy dust, just to be sure it might help.

A German merchant named Hennig Brand, in the 17th century, was also a passionate alchemy enthusiast. So passionate, that this hobby brought him to bankruptcy, and he would have remained poor, had not his wife been quite rich. Anyway, Henning came up with an idea he read about in a book, according to which a metal can be turned into gold if the metal is mixed with a substance that is produced from urine. Pee. So Henning vigorously approached the matter, and collected several thousand liters of urine and heated them with all kinds of methods to all kinds of temperatures with the intention that something would happen that would help him turn metal into gold. And something happened!

At one point, a cloud of gas suddenly rose from the bucket, and after the gas dissipated, a strange liquid remained in the bucket, which in the dark glowed with a greenish light! No one had seen such a liquid before. Henning was convinced that he had found the way to create gold, but after several experiments he was unable to produce gold from this strange substance. This is because Nigg was, in fact, able to discover phosphorus.

The phosphorus does not appear in nature in the form of a pure liquid, and it has to be distilled from the pee - which is exactly what Henning did. This was the first time anyone had produced a chemical element artificially. In general, the alchemists carried out a lot of different experiments and experiments, and although these were not really scientific experiments, with precise control and recording, etc., they nevertheless accumulated quite a bit of knowledge about various compounds, methods of working with chemical substances, and the like - knowledge that later became the basis of all the science of chemistry as we know it today.

So we've seen that wrong ideas can sometimes be just as important as right ideas. But here also a very important distinction needs to be made, between people who make mistakes without meaning to, and people who make mistakes on purpose. And I'm talking here about crooks, fraudsters, and since this is a lecture about science - about crooks in the field of science.

It is very difficult to put the finger on someone who came up with an unsuccessful idea, and say to him - you are a crook! There is a big chance that you will be wrong. For example, twenty years ago two distinguished professors from the University of Utah in the United States announced that they had discovered the way to perform cold fusion. For those who don't know, cold fusion is a method of producing energy - in the same way that the sun produces its energy: through the fusion of two atomic nuclei and the creation of a new atom. Such a process releases a lot of energy, so everyone would like to know how to do it. The problem is that it is no coincidence that the temperature on the sun is a good few million degrees Celsius. Fusion creates a lot of heat, and is impractical on Earth, except for a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb.

But these two researchers claimed to have managed to find the method to do it at room temperature! This caused a great stir in the scientific world. Everyone tried to reproduce their experiment - but it soon became clear that all experiments fail. Closer examination revealed that the original experiment was flawed. But no one (or rather, almost no one) called these professors 'charlatans'. It was clear that they were not deliberately trying to mislead the other scientists.

On the other hand, there is a man in the United States named Dennis Lee. Dennis Lee markets a generator to his customers, which he claims produces electricity, without an external fuel source. That means without a gasoline or diesel tank or a photovoltaic cell to absorb sunlight or something like that. If this sounds familiar to anyone, then yes - this is a leading Perpetum, a machine that puts out more energy than it takes in, and it violates the law of conservation of energy.

A lot of people accuse Dennis Lee of being a crook, and you can see why. We have every reason to believe that Dennis knows his machine doesn't work when he sells it to people, and he's already served time in prison for it. He's been convicted in a court of law, and there are orders prohibiting him from selling his products in all kinds of states in the United States. It doesn't stop him from making a lot of money from this trick, by the way, something like several million dollars so far. His method is very interesting: he does not sell the generator itself, because then he will be thrown into prison immediately. He sells only the future rights to profits from the generator. In this way, he makes money from people who believe that one day they will be rich, and still manages to evade law enforcement.

So how do you identify a crook? How do you know to say, 'It's an inventor or a scientist who made a mistake' or 'It's a crook trying to profit at the expense of others'.
This is not a simple distinction. You can say, for example, that we can be the one who was convicted in court - but there have already been cases where this was not true.

John Keeley, for example, was an inventor who lived in the United States, just over a century ago. For twenty years Keeley deceived tens of thousands of people, promising them a machine that could do heavy mechanical work, without the investment of energy. He also demonstrated this machine to them, and it did amazing things - bent iron beams, tore thick ropes, very impressive things. During such a typical demonstration, Keeley would drop a few drops of water into the water, then play the violin next to it: the motor would come to life and do its thing.

The stock of his company, 'My Keeley Motor Company' reached a price of about 500 dollars. Just so we get an idea, this is the value of Google stock today - and the dollar was worth much more then than it is today). Over the years, there were those who accused Keely of being a crook, and even took him to court. But in the court, Keeley came out right. The judge did not have a great understanding of science, and certainly not of thermodynamics (which was a very innovative science at the time), and did not understand that Keeley's claims were impossible and that there must be some kind of trick here.

Only after Keeley died in good health, several years after the trial, did the investors in his company discover that Keeley's entire house was networked with compressed air pipes that passed through double walls. In the basement they found a huge compressed air tank, weighing three tons. This compressed air flowed through the hidden ducts into Keeley's engine - the fiddling was just a disguise to prevent the spectators from hearing the whistle of the compressed air being released.

Although you can never be sure if someone is a fraud or not, there are some common characteristics of fraudsters - especially in the scientific field - that can be warning signs to someone who knows them, and prevent them from falling into the trap. I will give some such features, and small examples beside them. Scammers usually create an aura of mystery for themselves.

They are very interested in creating an impression among their audience that they are special, that there is something unusual about them that allows them to succeed
Where all others fail. Magicians create such a mysterious persona for themselves as part of their show, and con artists do it as part of their profession.

For example: there was an inventor named Joseph Pfaff, about thirty years ago, who claimed to have invented a car engine that did not need refueling. Instead of fuel

There was a mysterious gas mixture that only had to be changed every few years. To convince investors to back him, Paf (who was of Hungarian descent) claimed that he had worked in an atomic reactor in the Soviet Union as a youth, where he was exposed to incredible secrets that he could not reveal to anyone else the Russians would destroy him. A lot of people have paid him a lot of money over the years to get rights to this engine, but none of them have seen a penny worn out of it. The engine never worked as Puff promised, until the day of the inventor's death. This aura, of 'the man who learned the secrets of the Russians', helped Puff a lot to convince investors to pour more and more money into him, despite his continuous failures.

A good con artist should also know scientific jargon, the language scientists use to communicate ideas to each other. He doesn't have to know exactly the meaning of all the words he uses, but he has to use them in the right way to convince listeners, usually quite ignorant of science themselves, that he knows a lot. The one who does it excellently today, for example, is Tom Birdan - an American, who claims to have invented a machine that produces electricity from nothing, from the vacuum that exists between the atoms in the air. This is, of course, another impossible leading parapet. But Tom is able to formulate sentences and articles that, for those who are not versed in science, are not only completely incomprehensible

But they also sound exactly the way you imagine a wonderful and sophisticated idea like, for example, quantum theory, should sound.

Here is a quote: "If we refer to the non-linear nucleus it can be concluded that the pressure energy of the vacuum can be utilized by a four-channel stirring mechanism to realize an increased phase of an electromagnetic wave from the atom in response to a small signal." End quote. This nonsense greatly impresses those who need to be impressed.

Of course you have to be careful and not exaggerate, otherwise you fall into your own pit. Another crook, one named Otis Carr, tried to market a spaceship that would take off without fuel (yes, Perpetum Mobilya), and in a radio interview he was asked how fast his spaceship would move - at the speed of light! he answerd.

And outside the solar system? the moderator asked him. Otis was not confused: even twice the speed of light!! So you have to understand a little, not a lot, but a minimum.

It is also possible to catch fraudsters and scammers, if you pay attention to the small details. Attention and familiarity with the most basic scientific principles can allow us to discover inaccuracies in the 'hardware' that the scammer is trying to sell. A classic case of a crook who didn't know how to pay attention to the little details is that of Charles Radheffer, in Philadelphia two hundred years ago. Redhafer presented the audience with a rather routine Perpetum, of the spinning wheel type - very similar to that of Orpheus, but smaller. He sold tickets to people for the privilege of seeing his machine, but did not allow them to touch or inspect it. On one of the occasions, some engineer came to look at the wheel, and he brought his child with him - a boy about 14 years old or something in this area. The boy must have been very smart, because he managed to notice something that no one had seen before.

Redhafer's machine had two gears: one big, and one small. Redhaffer claimed that the older one was pushing the younger one and spinning it, but the boy noticed that the wear marks on the teeth of the wheels did not fit this description. The wear marks on the gears indicated that, in fact, the small wheel is the one pushing the big one! This was the key to discovering the cheating, and after the boy told the discovery to his father, the father investigated the matter in depth and it turned out that there was a spring, under the machine, that pushed the whole business.

Radheffer took his things and fled from Philadelphia to New York, but apparently he didn't learn a lesson because he set up a new machine there, and also there sold tickets to the audience in exchange for watching it. But he was really unlucky, and an engineer called Robert Fulton came to his exhibition. Fulton was a brilliant guy, credited with building the first steamship and several other inventions. Fulton also knew how to pay attention to the small details, and when he listened to the wheel as it turned, he noticed that the noise the machine was making did not match the noise a machine normally makes, which is a constant, cyclical noise. The noise in this case was almost random, out of order. He concluded from this that it is not a normal engine, but that someone turns it from the outside - because when a person turns a machine it is never really cyclical, there are always deviations from the rotation rate.

So Fulton challenged Radheffer, declaring that he was going to dismantle the studio for him to get to the bottom of the matter, and that if he was wrong he would pay for all the damage (he was quite rich, thanks to the steamship patent). Fulton really dismantled the room, and discovered behind the wall an old man riding a bicycle whose wheel was attached by a thin rope to Redhafer's machine. The reason the old man wasn't accurate in his rounds was because he was busy eating a sandwich.

By the way, sometimes a scientist can discover something that is right, but it will be so innovative that other scientists may not understand it properly, and think that he is wrong or a fraud. A classic example is the story of Robert Goddard. Today, Goddard is considered the father of rocket science, the man who contributed more than anyone to the development of modern rockets - all the launchers for satellites and spaceships, military missiles, and the like. But his story is quite sad. Goddard worked on the first rockets back in the twenties of the last century, and reached quite important conclusions and good theories. He published an article about the results of his research, and at the end of the article he wrote, by the way, that maybe one day it would be possible to use such rockets to land a man on the moon. This article came into the hands of an editor of the science section of one of the newspapers, and he read it.

It is important to understand that the science of rockets and missiles is complicated, difficult to understand. To this day, when you want to say in English that something is easy to understand, you say: 'You don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand it.' So this journalist probably skipped all the complicated equations, got to the paragraph about the moon - that's what he understood. He said to himself: there is no air in space, there is a vacuum - how will the rocket work? no air? After all, a plane can't fly if there's no air, right? So he wrote that Robert is an idiot, and talks nonsense. And everyone read that paper, and Goddard got a reputation as a complete evildoer, and the public stopped taking him seriously.

Robert Goddard continued to work, reaching very impressive achievements. Build rockets and launch them to heights that no one dreamed of reaching with an airplane back then. But his reputation was already ruined, and no one cared about him. On one occasion, when he did an experiment with one of his rockets and the rocket, due to a malfunction, crashed into some field - a headline appeared in the newspaper 'Robert missed the moon by three hundred thousand miles'!! What humiliations he suffered.

But not everyone is stupid, and the German scientists actually read his articles and understood what he was writing about. Then they took his ideas and built missiles with them for the Nazi army, and these missiles were called V-1 and V-2, and they did terrible damage in London in World War II. Then everyone suddenly realized that Goddard knew what he was talking about, and praised him and praised him, saying he was a genius. But he was already dead, so what did it matter? sad story

So this is just a small taste of the history of science, and the leading parapets and scientists and charlatans of this world. I hope this lecture made you see the world of science in a different way, maybe more interesting and full of little dramas and beautiful stories.

מקור

The article is taken from a lecture I gave at the Science Museum in Jerusalem, and is also a script from the show 'Making history!', A bi-weekly podcast about the history of science and technology, or on the website icast Under the 'Science and Technology' section.