Reported today on The Guardian For the full article visit:
The Guardian view on scientific progress: it's important to get things wrong
Editorial
A scientific theory aims to understand the world. It is only when nature reveals an error that it can be refined
Albert Einstein once remarked that God is subtle, but not malicious. The material world, he thought, was unpredictable. This made the world interesting but not impenetrable. Einstein, who brought lucidity to the deeply hidden, reasoned that "nature hides her secret because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse". Seen like this, science advances as much through what thinkers get right as what they get wrong. A scientific theory aims to understand the world. But it is only when nature reveals an error that it can be refined.
Few understood this better than Freeman Dyson, an insightful and brilliant theoretical physicist, who died last week. His cosmic genius roamed freely. Dyson wrote about religion, biology and the future of human society. He was a cheerful heretic – for example, calling work on nuclear fusion a "welfare programme" for engineers. He was also absurdly wrong about global warming. But his refusal to conform was essential to his view of a scientist as someone who produced theories that were right and wrong but believed in them with equal conviction.
Progress always involves making mistakes and then recognising them. That is because we are all struggling to understand why and how things are the way they are. When Dyson considered the idea that the limit to an energy supply that a species could have is all of the starlight in their solar system, logic would dictate that a sophisticated civilisation would build a structure to harness the entire power of its sun. This seemed eccentric at the time. Yet in 20
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