The Einstein who makes more errors than anyone else is precisely the same Einstein who succeeds in understanding more about nature than anyone else, and these are complementary and necessary aspects of the same profound intelligence: the audacity of thought, the courage to take risks, the lack of faith in received ideas—including, crucially, one’s own. To have the courage to make mistakes, to change one’s ideas, not once but repeatedly, in order to discover. In order to arrive at understanding. Being right is not the important thing—trying to understand is.
