From the “biggest blunder” to the Schrödinger cat: Einstein’s three errors

The geniuses are also human. Einstein may be the father of the theory of relativity and the physical who explained gravity and light, but also missed.

Even German sometimes doubted his own theories, and this insecurity led him to make some mistakes.

As he worked on his theory of general relativity, Einstein’s calculations suggested that gravity would make the universe contract or expand, which contradicted the vision accepted at the time the universe was static.

Thus, in its 1917 article on general relativity, Einstein introduced a “Cosmological constant” In their equations to effectively neutralize the impact of gravity, thus adhering to the orthodoxy that the universe was static.

About a decade later, scientists began to gather new evidence that the universe was not static. In fact, he was expanding.

Physicist George Gamow wrote later in his book My World Line: An Informal Autobiography, which Einstein commented, in retrospective, that “the introduction of the cosmological constant It was the biggest blunder that committed in life ”. But there was another turnaround.

Scientists now have proof that the expansion of the universe is accelerating due to the mysterious “dark energy”.

Some believe that Einstein’s cosmological constant, initially introduced to neutralize gravity in its equations, may actually be responsible for this energy – and perhaps it was not such a mistake.

The revelation of distant galaxies

Einstein’s theory of general relativity also predicted another phenomenon: that the gravitational field of a massive object, like a star, deviarity to light from a distant object behind it, actually functioning as a giant expansion lens.

Einstein thought the effect, known as Gravitational lensit would be too small to observe. He didn’t even intend to publish his calculations, until a Czech engineer named RW Mandl convinced him to do so.

Referring to his own 1936 article in Science Magazine, Einstein wrote to the editor: “Also allow me to thank you for your collaboration in the small publication that Mandl has started me. It has little value, but makes the poor happy.”

The value of what was in this small publication turned out to be quite significant for astronomy. It allows NASA’s Hubble Telescope, the US space agency, and the European Space Agency (ESA) to capture very distant, “expanded” galaxies details of huge cluster of galaxies closer to Earth.

“God does not shoot data”

Einstein’s work, including his 1905 article that describes light as waves and particles, has helped to establish the foundations for an emerging field of physics.

Quantum mechanics studies the bizarre and contraindicative world of the tiny subatomic particles. For example, a quantum object exists in “overlapping”, that is, in several states until it is observed and measured, when a value is attributed to it.

This was illustrated by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger In its famous paradox, the, according to which a cat inside a box can be considered simultaneously alive and dead until someone open the lid to check.

Einstein refused to accept this uncertainty. In 1926, he wrote to physicist Max Born that “[Deus] Don’t play the data. ”

In his 1935 article with scientists Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, he argued that if two overlapping objects were separated after they were in some way linked, a person who observed the first object and attributed a value to him, it would instantly fix a value to the second object without observed.

Although this mental experience has been conceived as a refutation of quantum overlap, it eventually paved the way decades later to develop a fundamental idea in the quantum mechanics that we today know as intertwiningwhich states that two objects can remain connected as if they were one, even if they are distant.

It seems, therefore, that Einstein was brilliant in his theories – and facilitated brilliance even in things that sometimes interpreted badly.