Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to, rationally speaking, the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. I'm your host, Massimo Luchi, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Well, Masimo, today we're pleased to feature a guest.

Mario Livio is an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, is also a popular lecturer and a bestselling author of several books, including The Accelerating Universe and the Golden Ratio The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved, and most recently, a book called Brilliant Blunders From Darwin to Einstein, Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists that changed our understanding of life in the universe. And that's what we are going to focus on in our discussion today. Mario, welcome.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

So I bet that our readers, listeners, rather, would be particularly interested to hear what you think Darwin's blunder was in formulating his theory of natural selection, because I at least was very surprised when I saw in the blurb about your book that you thought Darwin made an error.

Yeah, well, it's not just that I thought that he really made an error. Yes. So I after reading it, I found that that was an objectively fair interpretation. But if you can lay it out. Yeah.

So so basically, I mean, it's Darwin's time. They didn't know much about genetics. And of course, we cannot blame Darwin for that. Nobody knew about genetics at the time. The problem was and this is where he made a blunder, was that what he didn't realize, that with the theory of heredity that existed at the time, but natural selection simply would not have worked at all.

And I can explain how that works if you want to hear it right now or if you want to ask about it later.

Now, let's go on for a bit about the theory of inheritance, because that's actually it's an interesting, fascinating story that eventually went on for several decades, actually, after after this blunder. So. Right. That's on with Darwin and write.

Some of the reality that existed at the time was that the characteristics of the mother and the father, they get mixed in the offspring in the same way as you would mix paint or you feel you would mix gin and tonic. I like that analogy better.

Yes, I looked over at Massimo's face inside. Perk up after your second example.

Yes. So the thing is that if that were the case and of course, Darwin accepted that because that was the prevailing theory at the time. But if that were the case, then imagine now you know that you have a certain characteristic, let's say, that being green confers some advantage to to a butterfly or whatever, and you take one green butterfly into a population of a million red butterflies. And now this one green butterfly mates with one of these red butterflies.

And what you get is you mix like paint so green and red you would get something like brown, maybe. So already in the first generation, there is no green, really. And and further the farther you go, like with a gin and tonic, if you know, if you keep pouring tonic into it at the end, there will be no gin. So clearly there is no way that that particular characteristic that was supposed to be advantageous and passed on to the next generation would not work.

So natural selection would not work. So, you know, of course, this got corrected after, you know, Gregor Mendel proposed his ideas about genetics, which took a few decades for it to be accepted because his paper was initially ignored. But the idea is that really the way that genetics works is really more like shuffling two decks of cards, then like mixing pains in the sense that if you have a deck in your hand, an object somehow is a good thing to have.

No matter how much you shuffle the decks, you will still have the deck. And that's the way genes work and not like mixing of paints.

Now you make the point that there's this rumor or legend or however you want to call it, that Darwin actually had a copy of Mendel's paper or maybe of a book about Mendel. But it turns out that it did not. Have you actually looked into it that. That's right. I did not have the paper. Yeah, I did.

I did look into it. And even before me, somebody from the Darwin project looked into it because there have been no fewer than four books that claim that you see in later times. Darwin did state that did state a few things, which sounded more like Mendelian genetics. You know, he in particular, he said in one place that he thinks that maybe it will turn out at the end of heredity is more like mixing and not like true fusion and expressions like these.

So people raise the suspicion when maybe he said that because he actually read Mendel's paper. So first of all, it turned out that he didn't have Mendel's paper that was not in his possession. You know, at the time he died. It was published in a very obscure journal, after all, in a rather obscure journal to which he was not subscribe.

Someone must have raised this objection to him. No, you mean about blended in there? Yeah.

Surely someone else said, hey, Darwin, your theory has pointed out by an engineer named Fleming Jenkin. Yeah, Darwin. He was very weak in mathematics, so but but Junior, he knew mathematics, so he gave very good examples to show, you know, like the gin and tonic, which I used basically to say why the whole thing will be swamped and it would not see one of these single variations would not exhibit itself in any later generations.

Yeah, I feel like you don't have to be good at math to recognize problem there. You just have to be good at drinking.

Maybe, maybe that we could have used a little more drinking.

Now, it did have, however, a copy of a book that talked about Mendel, but you didn't actually get to do a book that Dr. Bustamente.

But what what I discovered and actually I put up I was so impressed by this that I asked the people at Cambridge to take a picture of it and to give it to me and I put it in the book, is that he actually never cut to the pages of that book where the mental experiment was mentioned. So he never really read that book. Plus, he actually had he read that book, he really would not have been illuminated much because the person who wrote that book, Phuket, did not himself understand the meaning of Mendel's experiment.

So you really talked about this very briefly and it was clear that he didn't understand what was the real import of those results.

And in fact, I would add that even had Darwin had actually read the paper and read it correctly and all that understood it. Now, there may still not have been enough because as as it turns out, the history of biology after that, after the rediscovery of Mendel's work in in nineteen hundred is still pretty long and complicated. I mean, it took another two or three decades, actually, for people like statistical geneticists like Fisher to figure out how to reconcile mentalism and Darwinism, because the first reaction actually the biologists had after the rediscovery of their work.

Yeah, they were contradictory of a natural selection.

And so because in some sense, for kind of the opposite reason, that of your example, with the with the blended blending of the diluting of the gene, that is the Mendelians, we're basically arguing that, look, if genes are these discrete things that get passed generation to generation, then there's not much that natural selection can do it.

It's mutation that actually brings up the new materials. So these people were also referred to as mutation tests and not natural selection. So natural selection at best can eliminate the bad stuff. You can actually build anything. And and it took actually Fisher and a couple of other brilliant mathematical geneticists to actually put the whole thing together. And that's right.

That's right. Only after the theory of population genetics was developed mathematically, then indeed, then then this was understood that actually Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection and Mendelian genetics actually need each other and they work together.

Yeah, just about the takeaway is that we should get from this case study of a blunder in the progress of science is would you say that the take away here is that it's it's useful for the progress of science, that people like Darwin sometimes, you know, don't notice that their new theory, their new idea contradicts pre-existing beliefs, because if they did, then they would just sort of give up and not and not put forth the new idea.

And, you know, often it's the case that the pre-existing theories are actually wrong or maybe that they think the take home message is simply that people should learn a little more mathematics or drink more.

Well, that was certainly true in Darwin's case. I mean, he was very weak on mathematics, but he was a genius nonetheless. And he formulated what is probably the most beautiful non mathematical theory that we actually have. Yeah, no, but there is there is a lesson here. I mean, well, there are many lessons really to be learned here. But one of them is and that's a lesson from the entire book really is that in many cases the progress of science, you know, is really not some sort of a direct march to the truth, if you like.

But it really has to go through these zigzag way where, you know, Darwin himself, when faced with that problem, he tried to correct it. It came up with a wrong theory for this and so on. And then he took this time to for people to digest what menders theory means, you know, and so on. So so this is how progress is actually made. I mean, by encountering the blunderer, people became aware of the fact that something needs to be corrected here.

The rest of it looks right and this is what happened.

Now, I want to jump to a second, another one of your example. In the book, which is actually a contemporary of Darwin, Lord Kelvin, the story there is interesting, too, and I'd like you to tell the story briefly, but but then one of the reasons it interests me is because in that case, Darwin actually had a problem with what turned out to be Calvin's blunder, Kelvin's mistake, because he'd do it to Calvin Cameron's ideas to contradicted the theory of natural selection.

But in this case, it turns out Darwin was actually right. So can you tell the story?

Yes. So so, Lord Kelvin, he definitely was a genius. I mean, he was a man of faith. Unlike Darwin, he was a person who knew mathematics perfectly. And he was also probably the most eminent physicist of his time. He also did lots of things in engineering and so on. So he did the first genuine calculation based on physics for the age of the Earth. Before that, people were taking all kinds of crazy numbers for the age of the Earth.

And he was the first person to try to actually use the real laws of physics, in that particular case, law of thermodynamics, to actually calculate the age of the earth. And the way he did this was a little bit like, you know, like in forensics today when they find a corpse and from the temperature of the body, they try to determine the time of death. So it was a bit like that. I mean, the assumption was that the earth was formed molten and very, very hot and it was basically losing its heat into space.

And so by measuring the rate at which the temperature in the earth changes with depth, Kelvin thought that he could actually determine the age of the Earth and determine the number, which was about one hundred million years, which is we know today, you know, by about a factor of 50 to short the earth is about 4.5 billion years old and a hundred million years definitely looked very, very short for Darwin's evolution to take place. In fact, Darwin had had serious doubts about mean, as you pointed out, he couldn't challenge Calvin on the calculations, but but he was convinced there was something must have been done, something wrong with it.

And it turns out that it took several years, actually, to figure out.

My understanding is that one of one of the problems with Calvin's original estimate, I mean, you go into some details in the book, but it's also that there was really no does it have to do with the fact that, for instance, nobody knew anything about nuclear fusion in stars.

So, for instance, it was inconceivable that a star like The Sun could last that long and that was a problem because they didn't know about nuclear fusion in stars. Kelvin actually did a separate calculation about the age of the sun. And there he assumed that the only source of energy that was available was gravitational, namely that the sun was kind of slowly contracting and it was releasing its heat, its gravitational energy. And from that, he got an age which was in the same ballpark is the hundred million years.

And that actually seemed to validate his calculation for the age of the Earth. And it is true that for as long as people did not know what to do about the sun, it was definitely difficult to convince Kelvin, at least, that his calculation of the age of the Earth was wrong, right?

Yeah, it makes sense when you when you have two different pieces of information that sort of point in the same direction, it's very reasonable to draw that conclusion. One of the things that I like about that story is actually that that Darwin's son wrote eventually later on in the beginning of the 20th century, a paper essentially defending his father's ideas based on the fact, of course, that by that point the radioactivity had been discovered. So based on the fact that the physics of was was beginning to sort of revisit the whole idea of of the source of energy for the four stars and so on, correct.

Radioactivity, at least, was identified as a source for heating the earth. They thought that maybe it could also heat the sun. But of course, it is not the case. It turned out not to be the source of energy for the sun.

Right. Mario, in scanning the history of blunders in scientific progress, did you notice any patterns as to why scientists make blunders, or was it just a different story?

Each time they they are different and at some level I even chose them to be somewhat different. So, you know, in the case of Kelvin, it turned out that it was something that he kind of thought that he can think of all the possibilities. And he didn't take into account that there are always some possibilities that are not foreseen. So so that was in his case. In the case of Linus Pauling, who is another person that I discussed, you know, it was more hubris or, you know, overconfidence based on his previous incredible successes and so on.

In the case of Einstein, who is another person I discussed, it was perhaps some sort of a misunderstanding of what elegance in theory is in physics really means in Cairo. If he thought that the elegance must manifest itself even in the form of the equation, and when in fact I mean, the elegance really appears in the principles involved and not in how the equation looks on paper. But so actually, it seems to me that Julia's question is a good one, I think that that that one way to look at the examples you pick and of course, this is you picked five examples as you as you pointed out, because they are very well understood and they're very different from each other.

And yet at least three of those people actually do seem to me to fall under the category of hubris or too much self-confidence.

I mean, I would put their Kelvyn, you point out, refused for a long time than to admit that he was that he was wrong, even though the evidence was beginning to accumulate. The same goes for Fred Oil and the story of the Big Bang and of course, Linus Pauling. So at least three of these people, I think, do have in common the fact that they were so brilliant and clearly so accomplished that they just couldn't conceive that they could possibly be wrong.

You're right. But but there was differences in the case, for example, of Fred Hoyle. There was it really was a case of denial in some sense.

In the case of let's go over the story, because there's an interesting story. Yeah. Let me just on the complete that in the case of Pauline, he actually admitted that he was wrong, you know, so so so there was a difference there.

Yeah. Fred Hoyle. Well, let me start by saying that Fred Hoyle was a brilliant man. I mean, he was no doubt a genius. And he was certainly one of the best astrophysicist and cosmologist of the 20th century. Now, having said that, he came up with this extraordinarily elegant ideal for steady state model for the universe. The reason I say so elegant, do you see we see in cosmology, we have what is called the cosmological principle that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic, which means it's the same everywhere and the same in every direction that we look.

Well, Fred Hoyle added to that and said, you know what? And it's also the same at every time. It was always the same and it will always stay the same. I mean, not just in space, but also in time. That's right. So it's a fantastic idea. And not only that, it kind of also fits nicely with our idea that maybe the laws of physics themselves don't change. Well, you know, if the laws of physics don't change, then maybe the universe doesn't change either, you know, and so on.

So the idea was was was really beautiful, a beautiful idea. The problem was that as evidence started accumulating that the universe is actually evolving and actually started from a big bang. He really refused to actually till his last day to accept that model, you know, the Big Bang model. And because he was brilliant, he continued to invent all kinds of ways. You know, how we could explain the amassing evidence in different ways, but still keeping some sort of a quasi steady state model for the universe.

So he stepped from a rational approach to the to the problem, to a rationalizing approach to the problem. Right. Right, right. So brilliant that he could come up with excuses, basically one after another.

That's right. Even even when actually nobody was believing those excuses anymore. Mario, you've probably encountered the I think Michael Shermer was the one who popularized this point about how it is that very smart people can believe and continue to believe such absurd things, even in the face of mounting confirmatory evidence.

And it's very much like you're the star story of Hoyle suggests that very smart people are all the more able to come up with reasons why what seems like an absurdly wrong belief is actually correct. And, you know, all the more able to find potential flaws in their opponents arguments. You're right.

I mean, they also, you know, after being great many times, they almost become addicted to being right and they have a hard time accepting when they actually are wrong.

I mentioned in the book that there was a famous physicist, Max Planck wrote once that when new ideas are being finally accepted, it's not because the old physicists accept them. You say the old physics is simply die and it's the new generation that was already grew up with the new ideas.

They accept the ideas, although I have to mention that I was heartworms to notice a counter example in your book, also of a actually a philosopher, Karl Popper, in this case, who accepted that he was wrong quite quite graciously.

He had been I guess he'd been arguing that the theory of natural selection was sort of tautological and didn't actually didn't actually limit the space of possible ways the world could be.

And he referred to it as a metaphysical research program as opposed to a scientific theory.

Yeah. All right. Yeah. And and so he did end up, as you said, recognizing his error in later years.

And he wrote, I have changed my mind about the testability and the logical status of natural selection.

And I'm glad to have the opportunity to make a recantation, which I highlighted so that I could say this. This was indeed very nice. And I also noted that Pauling himself admitted that he was wrong. I mean, so not everybody continued to hold the idea that they were right till the end.

Now, the funny thing about the paper instance is, of course, that Popper's criticism of natural selection as a theory is widely cited by creationists.

And his recantation is not for for reasons that I think had to do with malicious intelligent design.

But anyway, now another one of the things it seems and whether to run a little bit through some of the examples, certainly not all, but some of the examples that you bring in in the book is this idea that people who commit sort of big blunders, you say that you're interested in the big blunders, the blunders that that make a difference in the history of science. And a certain number of those people seem to be the kind of scientist that is not afraid of exposing iconoclastic ideas and unpopular ideas.

And in fact, Fred, oil himself is a very good example. I mean, later on in his very late in his career, toward the end of his career, he actually also attacked.

The theory of evolution seems to be the sort of favorite hobby of iconoclastic scientists and philosophers, for that matter.

And, you know, he did it on the basis of what he thought was sound mathematical reasoning, basically attempted a calculation of the probability of the evolution of a DNA molecule and, you know, that sort of stuff.

And as far as I actually looked into it, I reviewed the book that he wrote about this thing. And as far as I can tell, the calculation was correct. The problem is that the assumptions that went into the calculation were completely off. And I suspect that was because he just did not get enough, you know, did not take the biology seriously. Essentially, you really there is no way you can do a meaningful calculation of that sort, because we don't know enough about the early stages of evolution of replicating systems.

We don't we don't know how often certain conditions took place and so on and so forth.

But it's interesting that, you know, he was not afraid of that. And he made very clear that he didn't consider himself a creationist or an intelligent design supporter or anything like that, even though, of course, those people claimed him immediately.

But he was simply not afraid of going out there and said, here's what I think. And I don't I don't care if the rest of the universe doesn't seem to agree. Eventually they'll see the light.

Yeah, that's right. That was absolutely typical of Hoyle. I mean, Hoyle, you know, from day one, basically say that you good scientist, they go against the mainstream. You know, that there is no point in agreeing with everybody, you know, and so on. Now, he took that to a fall, you know, this particular recommendation, and he decided almost to go against the mainstream with almost everything he did. And in some cases, you know, he was successful in others, much less so.

There is also, you know, I guess in the book I tried to discuss a little bit, you know, the reasons that he might have done some of these at the end of his life and so on and. There is this point, which I think is an interesting one, which is when you have some really great scientists who have done fantastic work at some point in their life and then, you know, they reached the end of their career and they find it really completely boring and uninteresting to just continue to do some incremental science.

So instead, what happens is they choose on some completely different topic and they try to come up with some completely new idea on that topic, even if they are actually not experts in that particular field. And, you know, in the case of Pawling, I mean, vitamin C comes to mind, which he turned it into an obsession and so on.

So you see this straight as well in some of these people, you know, where they try to make yet another big thing instead of satisfying themselves with what they have already done and just go on and do some, you know, good but incremental science.

And sometimes that strategy actually works even for young scientists.

I mean, after all, both Watson and Crick, the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA and direct competitors with polling there were also coming actually from very different fields.

I mean, Crick was a physicist and and Watson was an ornithologist. So neither one of them had much knowledge about molecular biology, crystallography and things like that. And yet they obviously made a right move in terms of career clearly, but tried it again later. For instance, in his career, he moved to studies of the brain. And even though he did write several technical papers in that field, I'm not aware that he made any actual breakthrough in that particular field.

So no. Yeah, but he did all kinds of good work. I mean, Watson and Crick had the advantage of being young and having seen how poorly polling's works. Right. So they basically imitated his his way of war, only that they actually did it better than him because he more or less spent spent one month thinking of DNA while they decided to make that their life's mission.

Mario in the kuda to brilliant blunders. You bring up just briefly some of the literature on domestiques and biases and the way that human intuition can lead us astray. And and this is sort of in the context of explaining how it is that scientists like Darwin are pulling your Einstein could end up making mistakes, that they had this trust, as we all do in our, you know, intuitively in our intuition that our intuition would guide them to the correct answer.

And so I thought this was an interesting point, because it does seem like intuition is pretty indispensable to scientific discovery. So it certainly doesn't seem and I don't think you were claiming this doesn't seem like a very simple you know, scientists make mistakes because they rely on their intuition. Do you have any thoughts about what the right role is of intuition in the scientific progress? Is there is there anything that we can say about.

I'm really sure that there is a rule. I mean, you know, I I look in on people, for example, in the field of astrophysics, you know, there were two astrophysicist, one named Eddington and one named Gene, who lived around the same time a little bit before Hoyle. They were both brilliant mathematically and yet and they both made important contributions. But I think John's contribution far exceeded those of genes. And when you actually look more carefully at what happened there, you almost always see that when they were on opposite sides with their ideas about something, somehow Eddington always turned out to be right and genes to be wrong.

And when this happens, once you say, well, OK, it can happen even twice, OK, it can happen when it happens time and again, you start to think, well, maybe there is some lack of insight here, you know, and so on. And but it's hard to tell, you know, what is it that gives one person this insight? Einstein, of course, is the perfect example of just profound insights. That and special relativity was in the air.

You know, had Einstein not done it, somebody else would have had punker there was very close to actually formulating similar ideas and so on. But general relativity was really hardly in the air at all when Einstein did it. And it is still amazing.

How did he come up with that Einstein to follow up with and really question the in classical philosophy of science meaning? Mid to twenty to middle part of the 20th century, let's say people were making a pretty sharp distinction these days, the distinction is still holds, but it's a little less sharp between the context of discovery in the context of justification. The idea was that the context of discoveries is it answers the question of how is it that science actually come up with new ideas?

And the context of justification deals with the question of, well, once you have the idea, you know, what are the logical and empirically based methods by which you actually test those ideas?

And Popper, for instance, presented these these simple schema according to which the job of the philosopher is really to to to look at at the second question, the context of justification. There's always it a scientist once that they have that their ideas actually go about justify them in a rational way. But the context of discovery, according to Popper, is really the province of psychology because it has to do with human intuitions and with, you know, unconscious processing of, you know, loads of information.

And these these idea these that that new ideas come up out of nowhere, seemingly. I mean, surely they come up with somewhere, but they come up out of nowhere and under very different circumstances. You know, the typical example, you go and take a shower and all of a sudden you come out and the idea structure, it's not that that taking a shower, you know, therefore you should take more showers and have more ideas.

But but the thing is, these showers, it's not a it's not a bad idea in general. That's wrong.

But the idea is that that, you know, the context of discovery, it really is, is at the roots goes at the roots of human psychology. And how is it that we formulate, you know, new new thoughts and new ideas and there is not much you can do there in terms of sort of philosophizing about it or thinking about it rationally?

It just happens in certain ways. Now, that said, there are certain regularities.

One of the ones that struck me was a study a few years ago that showed that the major predictor of of successful, successful science career, you know, and they looked at a bunch of possible statistical predictors. The major predictor by far was simply the sheer number of published papers. And the basic idea was, therefore, that a major difference between a successful scientific career and an unsuccessful scientific career is not necessarily that the successful scientists have better idea.

Or more often, it's just a day produce a lot more. They keep shooting at the targets and eventually they're going to hit something.

And scientists that are much more conservative about publishing, they may be just as brilliant and just as insightful. But, you know, if you only shoot once in a while and the probability is about the same of hitting the target, you're not going to hit it.

And it's you know, I don't it would be nice to sort of replicate that study and then see what actually, you know, what the dynamics is.

But it's it's one of those things that that show you that there are regularities, but not necessarily the ones you will predict.

Right at the same time. You know, I would point out that, you know, Einstein did not write a huge number of papers, but somehow every single one of those counts.

So, Mario, in what way do you think that Einstein's intuitions about the beauty of scientific principles led him astray? So you see the main idea of both general relativity was that the gravity is not this mysterious force that acts across the vast distances of space, but that gravity really represents a curvature or a warping of spacetime, that if you have a mass in the same way that if I stand on a trampoline, I cause it to sag, then a mass closet space time between disunity to work and then, you know, like, for example, the sun does that and then the planets basically move in the shortest paths in that curved space time.

So this was an incredible idea and an incredible intuition. Now, when he tried to apply this theory to the universe at large, he thought that at the time that the universe was static, that everything was static. So he realized that there is a problem, because if there is a gravity, you know, between every all of the bodies there, then the universe was going to collapse under its own weight. So he basically said, oh, well, in that case, I need to introduce a term that will exactly balance gravity everywhere.

Now, introduced that term as some sort of an additive term with a plus sign between that and the other term in this equation.

And he was happy for a very short life that he could create a sort of a static universe. Now, when it was discovered at the end of the 1920s that the universe is actually expanding, you said, well, wait a minute, if the universe is expanding, I don't need to balance everything everywhere. I mean, what gravity would do, it would simply slow down the expansion. And he removed that term from his equation because he didn't like it, particularly from the beginning, because he felt it was ended kind of you know, we don't like new constants being added with a plus sign, you know, and so on.

This kind of occludes the thing. Yeah, well, like a fudge factor. And so the thing was that general relativity actually allowed the introduction of that term into the equation. And so it wasn't violating the beauty of the theory in terms of its basic principle. It was just violating in his eyes the beauty of the form of the equation. So he removed that. Now, in nineteen ninety eight, we discovered that the expansion of the universe is in fact speeding up.

It's accelerating.

Yeah, I still haven't gotten over that one. And guess what?

You know, it appears to be prepared precisely by that term, by that cosmological constant that Einstein removed from his equation.

So he stuck with his original intuition in this case, you know, with the fact that the theory allowed for that term to be it could have actually predicted the acceleration of the universe and but instead he removed it when in fact, the term was allowed by the equations. We have since then learned time and again that the way physics works more or less is that every term that is allowed is basically compulsory, probably needs to be there.

But in general, isn't adding a fudge factor when your equation doesn't balance out. Isn't that in general a sign that you've done something wrong somewhere along the line?

Yes, but when spoken like this is a fudge factor. But you see, you were loading the of that two things into general relativity.

Why keep this incredible principle that the laws of physics should look the same to every observer, whatever the observer does, you know, and so on is not easy. I mean, there are only certain ways that that can be done. And the way that he ended that question was one of those ways where it could be done. So it really wasn't in that sense of fudge factor.

Well, Mario, we are just running out of time for this section of the podcast. So let's wrap things up and move on to the rationally speaking, PEX. Welcome back. Every episode, we pick a suggestion for our listeners that has called our rational fancy. This time we asked our guest, Mario Livio, for his suggestion.

Mario. Yes, so a book that given that my book is called Brilliant Blunders and it's about blunders, I thought that I would recommend a book that's called Being Wrong Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schultz. It's a wonderful book. I thought that really talks about these things that, you know, we are we are so afraid of being wrong that we sometimes, in a way prevents us from doing things. And she's basically calling on, you know, embracing of the feeling of not to be afraid of being wrong.

This feats actually very nicely with with the point I was trying to make. And that is the following, that sometimes to get really breakthroughs, you need to think outside the box. You need to think unconventionally and in some sort of innovative ways. And but when you do that, there is a risk you're taking off of actually being wrong. But you must realize that this is part of how the game is being played. Now, I want again to emphasize the fact that I'm not advocating being sloppy.

That's not I mean, it's not that you should be careless. You should do very careful science and thinking and everything, you know, and so on. But to realize that. Sometimes, really, discoveries come from this against the mainstream kind of thinking in mathematical terms. Know if you are stuck in some minimum, you know, in some in some hole, you know, if all you do is some infinitesimal change, it's not going to get you out of there.

You need to do something that mathematicians call sometimes finite amplitude perturbation, namely, you know, you need to make a bold move to actually be able to get out of there. And and in this book, Being Wrong discusses more of these these general feeling of, you know, how do we feel? Well, with our emotional responses and so on, it works along completely different lines than my book. But I think it complements it in in some nice ways.

Yeah, I agree.

I am also a fan of being wrong. I agree it's a great compliment for brilliant blunders. And I also think it shares some of the sort of eloquent narrative feel of your book like. Our listeners, as you've probably noticed, Mario is a great storyteller, and that definitely comes through in brilliant blunders as well. So we'll have a link to brilliant blunders on our website, and I encourage you to pick it up. And Mario, it's been a pleasure having you as a guest on rationally speaking, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you. Thank you very much for having me. This concludes another episode of rationally speaking. Join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benny Pollack and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, Truth by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.