But actually Einstein was ‘wrong’ about many things. He made a few trivial lapses in his calculations. He famously fudged his theory of general relativity to avoid its prediction of an expanding universe, just a few years before astronomers found that to be precisely the state of the cosmos. Even his many proofs of the celebrated E = mc2 contained little gaffes. Heck, there’s an entire book enumerating Einstein’s mistakes.*1 None of this has the slightest bearing on Einstein’s status as the greatest scientist of the twentieth century. To imagine that genius implies freedom from error is to
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