Do you know each other?
do you need a prescription for codeine cough syrup Taking risks is part of genius, and genius is not immune to bloopers. Mario Livio's "Brilliant Blunders" leads us through the circumstances that surrounded famous gaffes. For instance, Charles Darwin proposed a theory about how inheritance worked that was utterly fanciful, while Albert Einstein introduced a "cosmological constant" to keep his relativistic universe from collapsing. Einstein probably never actually called this his "biggest blunder," but he did acknowledge that the introduction of this fudge factor left him with a "bad conscience." Ironically, that same constant is now being reconsidered to account for dark energy, which neither Einstein nor anyone else in physics knew about at the time. Some combination of too little data and too much reliance on intuition played a role in most of these blunders. But the author's goal is not to ridicule???quite the contrary. Mr. Livio helps us see that such spectacular errors are opportunities rather than setbacks. There's a lesson for young scientists here. Boldly attacking problems of fundamental significance can have more impact than pursuing precise solutions to minor questions???even if there are a few bungles along the way.