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Embrace mistakes, urges Mario Livio - they are portals to scientific progress.
In a July 1991 Nature paper1, astronomers Andrew Lyne, Matthew Bailes and S. L. Shemar made an electrifying announcement: the discovery of the first planet outside our Solar System. To everyone's surprise, it was not orbiting a Sun-like star but a pulsar - the dense, spinning neutron-star offspring of a supernova explosion. The putative planet gave itself away by altering the period of radio-frequency flashes given offby the pulsar.
Unfortunately, Lyne and Bailes had to retract this result a few months later after uncovering an error, which they reported2 in Nature in January 1992. The astronomers courageously announced that they had not corrected adequately for Earth's motion around the Sun. Lyne's revelation of the blunder at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society that month won him a standing ovation. But the story had a happier ending.
Immediately after Lyne's presentation, astronomer Aleksander Wolszczan announced that he and his colleague Dale Frail had discovered two planets orbiting another pulsar using the same technique. These turned out to indeed be the first discoveries of extrasolar planets. Wolszczan told me that Lyne's original paper had acted as a "confidence booster", convincing him that the signals in his data were real. By the time Lyne withdrew his result, Wolszczan had performed enough tests to be certain.
Blunders are an essential part of the scientific process. Research is not a linear march to the truth but a zigzag path, involving trial and error. Mistakes are not the exclusive province of sloppy or inexperienced scientists. Even the brightest luminaries - including Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein - made serious blunders.
Truly innovative ideas require a willingness to embrace risks, and acceptance of the fact that errors can be portals to progress. Although this is well known in some private companies engaged in research and development, academics today are slow in recognizing the necessity of blunders.
Chemist Linus Pauling knew it. His former postdoc, Jack Dunitz, recalls being told: "Mistakes do no harm in science because there are lots of smart people out there who will immediately spot a mistake and correct it. You can only make a fool of yourself and...