Even great scientists can get it all wrong, and it is interesting to see how and when they do. Physicist Gerald Schroeder recalls an interesting fact about the career of Albert Michelson, of the 1887 Michelson Morley experiment that measured the speed of light,

"In 1894, Albert Michelson delivered the main address at the dedication of the Ryerson Physical Laboratory of the University of Chicago. Michelson took the opportunity to declare that "The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered." The physics community thought that there was not much new to learn about our universe. (p. xi-xii)

In fact, a little over a decade later in 1905, Albert Einstein published a series of papers that completely overturned physicists' picture of our universe, replacing it with the bewildering world of relativity both of space and of time.

Yet Albert Einstein, who had himself revolutionized physics by introducing relativity, committed what he called the "biggest blunder of my life" in an attempt to defend the traditional preference of scientists for an eternal universe.

Einstein's biggest blunder: Attempting to "save" the eternal universe

Here's what happened, as Schroeder tells it:

In 1917, Einstein developed equations to describe the universe using the general relativity laws that he had published two years earlier. But he didn't like his equations because they seemed to show that the universe was "dynamic." He thought it should be static and eternal. Still, Vesto Slipher's astronomical measurements at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, which depended on Einstein's own relativity laws, implied that our universe is expanding.

But Einstein so much needed to believe that the universe was static and eternal that he actually changed his equations to include the famous cosmological constant he later so deeply regretted. Schroeder reflects,

Why the biggest blunder? Einstein realized that if day by day the universe was expanding, getting ever larger, then what about yesterday, a year ago, a millennium ago, and ever backward until billions of years ago there was only a point, a point that marked the beginning. Einstein could have followed his own discoveries and predicted the most important statement every made relative to man and the universe: there was a creation. And he blew it. He could not give up his opinion in favor of his facts.

Einstein was a great scientist and he went on from there, wiser.

Eternal universe - a rabbit in every hat!

The "eternal universe" is a very convenient belief, actually, because it makes certain difficult problems disappear - for example the origin of life.

Any physically possible thing will happen eventually in a universe that has always existed and always will exist. Perhaps life could originate by pure chance, for example, given enough time. But if we put a date on the beginning of the universe, what happens? Now we must reckon with probabilities. How probable is it that a given event happened by chance?

To see how unlikely a chance origin of life is in our universe, with a finite beginning in time 13.7 billion years ago, see Chapter 8 of The Design of Life.

The universe has a hot date?

Putting a date on the universe is just what Georges Lemaitre did. The Belgian priest (1894–1966) was an Einstein fan, and he proposed in 1927 that Einstein's theories would work much better if we just accepted that the universe began as a single explosive point and has been spreading out from there ever since. It is now between 10 and 20 billion years old, not forever old. (It wasn't possible for Lemaitre to be more specific about the time span then.)

Lemaitre's theory was dubbed the "Big Bang"by famous astronomer Fred Hoyle, who hated the idea.

Many other scientists were displeased as well. Arthur Eddington said, "Philosophically, the notion of a beginning to the present order is repugnant to me. I should like to find a genuine loophole."

Indeed, the idea that the universe has a beginning took some time to catch on. According to Schroeder, in a 1959 survey, two thirds of leading U.S. astronomers still believed that the universe was eternal. It had always existed. It did not have a beginning.

Of course, today, the Big Bang is taken for granted, because it has been confirmed by many studies of the universe.

As a result, some problems, like the origin of life, have become much more serious.

Open mind? ... or critical thinking?

It is often said that scientists need to keep an open mind. That is true, but it isn't enough. G. K. Chesterton famously noted,

Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

If all we have is an open mind, we will believe anything we hear. What a scientist needs is critical thinking - the ability to examine assumptions as well as accumulate information.