The Wisdom of Making Errors

The work of scientists is known for its rigour, honesty and precision. But it is not always like this. The history of science is littered with howlers of greater or lesser importance, and in the worst cases some have persisted for a long time or have impeded scientific development. The causes of scientific gaffs are various, ranging from lack of knowledge to stubbornness and the love of a good argument.

Doctor Robert M. Youngson wrote in his book Torpezas científicas: una breve historia que cuán errados pueden estar a veces los científicos, “some errors are the result of a lack of care; others come from arrogance; others arise from ignorance and preconceptions; sometimes it is just bad luck; and other times they have to be attributed to human weakness”.

Below is a selection of some of the monumental scientific blunders that have come out of the laboratory. Many of them are incomprehensible in the light of modern knowledge.

Aristotle (384-322 BC)
A student in Plato's school and chosen by Philip of Macedonia to be teacher to Alexander the Great, this influential Greek philosopher arrived at the conclusion that a heavy weight falls at a higher velocity than a light weight. So if one stone is falling and another is attached to it, the higher one will push the lower one, increasing its velocity. This error persisted for almost 19 centuries until Newton dared to correct it; such was the veneration of the teachers of the middle ages towards Aristotle that no one presumed to cast a shadow of a doubt over his writings. [Translator's note: echoes of this peculiar idea can be traced even to this day: Evangelical scientists refute gravity with new 'intelligent falling' theory.] Perhaps his most disastrous idea, one which dominated the advance of biology until the 16th century, was his theory of the three spirits: vegetable for plants, animal for animals and rational for man. He wanted to introduce an animating and miraculous principle with this last 'spirit' which has confused generations of biologists. The philosopher from Stageira also made a number of errors in the field of medicine, especially concerning female nature which he considered to be a natural defect. Here are some pearls of wisdom that he has left us:

• The brain of the male is larger than the brain of the female and the male cranium has a larger number of joints so that the brain can breathe more easily.

• The female body has one bone less than the male.

• The body of a woman is unfinished, like that of a child, and lacks semen, like that of a sterile man.

• As everything that is small, both artificial and natural, reaches its end more quickly and the woman is smaller than the man, so the woman gets older more quickly than a man.

• The flesh of a man is compact and that of a woman is porous and damp. This explains why the breasts of the woman, compared with the chest of a man, appear like swollen sponges, capable of being filled with milk, and soft; and also why they become flabby so quickly.

• Menstrual blood is a food residue caused by the lack of warmth in the body of the woman: “In the weaker sex the residues must be more abundant as their digestion is less complete”.

• Male sperm is cooked in the body of the man from the blood and its equivalent in the woman is menstrual blood, a liquid that has not undertaken this metamorphosis. The function of the testicles is to server as a counter balance to the penis.

• The father and not the mother introduces the sensitive spirit into the embryo, and also its form and type. The fact that a male child can appear like its mother or the mother's family can be explained by a failure of the transmission of the form of the father owing to an abnormal loss in strength. Aristotle branded males who did not appear like their fathers as monsters.

• Women do not suffer nose bleeds nor haemorrhoids because their veins are less vigorous than those of men.

• The woman does not reason, changes her opinion easily, doesn't keep her word, shouts and cries easily. The man, in contrast reasons and applies logic because he thinks with his head; women do not reason because they think with their womb, the hystera. (From this word comes the concept of female hysteria).

Paracelso (1493-1541)
Perhaps confused by the biological similarity of fertilization, fermentation and putrefaction, this Swiss doctor and naturalist created a recipe for making a human being other than by natural procreation: “allow the sperm of a man to decay in a container for four days until, at last, it begins to live, move and become aware. At this time it appears, to a certain degree, like a human creature; but it is still translucent and lacks a body. After this time, feed it daily and cautiously on the mystery of human blood and maintain it for 40 weeks at a temperature equal to that of a horse's stomach; then it will transform itself into a real live baby, and begin to develop and acquire intelligence. This is one of the secrets revealed by God to mortal man”. No expert has been able to explain how a doctor of the stature of Paracelso was able to communicate such an unbelievable idea to his colleagues so calmly, as if it was something that he had experienced and confirmed it himself.

Galileo (1564-1642)
He was not able to explain the origin of comets correctly, considering them to be mere optical artefacts, a type of celestial mirage. He also failed to understand the tides, claiming that the movement of ocean waters was caused by the rotation of the earth about its axis and around the sun.

Donald A. Wright
A German physicist, he published an apparently serious article in The Worm Runner's Digest in the 70s about the nature of phantoms. Wright explained the unusual behaviour of these mythical entities using the principles of physics and quantum mechanics. In the article he said that the phantoms are so insubstantial that they can only been seen in very dim light as the pressure of light appears to them as blows from a baseball bat. This is why they only come out at night. He deduced that the mass of a phantom couldn't be greater than the mass of an electron, which implies that they can be accelerated to velocities approaching the speed of light by applying only a small amount of energy. In addition he deduced that at a temperature of about 20 degrees, phantoms reached velocities of 70% of the speed of light. This means that few phantoms can be seen at temperatures above -273 degrees. To conclude, he described an infallible method for scaring them away: talking when they are nearby, as a word said near to them was sufficient to send them out of the solar system. [Translator's note: The Worm Runners Digest is well known for its spoofs on science, so this originally may well have been a joke.]

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829)
According to the theory of evolution proposed by this French scientist, the evolution of the species is due to a sequence of circumstances: environmental changes create new requirements that determine the use or disuse of one or other of the organs, which end up by being developed or atrophied according to their degree of utilization. And these changes are inherited. Lamarck claimed that if an eye was removed from a newly born animal and that animal was mated, then one could obtain a race with a single visual organ.

René Blondot (1849-1930)
In the middle of the period during which discoveries in nuclear physics such as X-rays and radioactivity were at their height, this French physicist announced the discovery of N-radiation in 1903. This was a mysterious radiation capable of passing through all types of material, except things like wet cardboard. N-rays could be diffracted through an aluminium prism and were unaffected by magnetic fields. During national rejoicing, French laboratories hurried to study the properties of this new radiation whose emission was recorded even from dead organisms; and Blondot was covered with honours from L'Académia des Sciences and other prestigious organizations. However, outside France no scientist was able to detect and measure these rays. To resolve the mystery, the journal Nature sent the American physicist Robert Wood to Blondot's laboratory. Blondot enthusiastically demonstrated how he generated the N-rays, but at a moment in the experiment, when the laboratory was in darkness, Wood removed a prism that was thought essential for the procedure. To the surprise of all involved, the experiment didn't fail and it appeared that everything carried on as normal. From that moment, the results that everyone had seen could no longer be reproduced, and the N-rays were never mentioned again. Even today, some still ask how it was possible for not only Blondot but also for a group of prestigious scientists from his country to have committed such an error.

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Count of Buffon (107-1788)
This naturalist and polymath French scientist made the blunder of claiming that he found spermatozoa in the ovaries of a female dog that he was dissecting. He believed that semen was made in the ovaries. Another of his buffoneries was his theory of the evolution of the species by sliding descent. He believed that the monkey was a degenerate man, that the donkey was the degeneration of a horse and so on.

Edmund Halley (156-1742)
An English astronomer, famous for having identified and predicted the path of the comet that carries his name, claimed that the earth was hollow and that three planets orbited in its interior. The Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) went even further outside the mark by adding that the hollow earth was populated by a human civilization that was illuminated by a central sun.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934)
In his later years, the Nobel prize winner allowed himself to be seduced by parapsychology. He was so fascinated by dreams and psychology that each morning he would record the dreams that he had the night before and paid a medium from Zaragoza to carry out experiments in spiritualism. The woman, who confirmed that she was inspired by the Angel Gabriel, answered questions with the aid of a sister of hers, a nun who had died some time ago. Cajal uncovered the trick. The phantom figure was none other than the medium herself who was disguised and deformed her face with pieces of rubber that she put in her nostrils and mouth.

Johan Jakob Scheuchzer (1672-1733)
This Swiss naturalist presented to the scientific community in 1726 the fossil of a gigantic salamander found in a mine in Öhningen (Germany) as the remains of a fish that died during The Great Flood. He convinced many of his colleagues that the biblical catastrophe occurred in 2306BC.

Claudio Ptolomeo (85-165)
The Egyptian astronomer and geographer proposed a system of concentric spheres as the basis for celestial mechanics that persisted for more than 1400 years. He described a universe based on the Aristotelian system where the earth was fixed and surrounded by 8 spheres: the first 7 containing the sum, moon and the 5 known planets of the time - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, and the eighth containing the fixed stars.

Regnier de Graaf (1641-1673)
He discovered the female follicles, which surround the ovums, at a time when it was thought that females had testicles, from which came eggs that were going to hatch in the uterus. The idea that women made eggs was abhorrent to De Graaf who could not prevent the appearance of a school of followers who proposed that the female ovum contained the future human being in miniature.

Jacques Benveniste
In 1988, the team of French investigators led by Benveniste captured the interest of the media by claiming in the journal Nature that the effect of homoeopathic medicines could be demonstrated in vitro. The extreme dilutions that they employed, that could not contain a single molecule of the active material, seemed to act by a mechanism that Benveniste called the memory of the water. Obviously, homoeopaths were delighted, but their joy did not last long. In response to the criticism by the scientific majority, the journal Nature sent a committee of experts to evaluate the French results. A number of errors were found in the controls used in the experiments which invalidated the finding of Benveniste and wounded his pride. The French society tried to prevent the publication, but among the group of experts was James Randi, an illusionist known for his devastating analysis of psychic experiments. Ever since then, no one has been able to reproduce the results of Benveniste whose work was almost certainly funded by a pharmaceutical company making homoeopathic products.