A Review Of Mario Livio's Brilliant Blunders Summary
Honors Biology Book Review
I chose to read the book Brilliant Blunders by Mario Livio. This book was mainly focused upon the mistakes that famous scientists made that actually came to be very significant in their respective fields of study, hence the title Brilliant Blunders. It concerns the work of five scientists in particular: Charles Darwin, William Thomson, Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle, and last but certainly not least Albert Einstein.
Albert Einstein wrote in a letter in 1915 about the most common ways a scientist makes mistakes. These were that they created a false hypothesis or that their arguments are invalid or not logical. Many people agreed with this and many also disagreed, arguing that every science makes mistakes and that Einstein himself made these same mistakes on multiple …show more content…
Pauling had stumbled when he was perceiving DNA to have three interwoven strands instead of two. I find it very interesting that if Watson and Crick had not also been working to discover the structure and Pauling had not caught that he made an error, then people might have thought that he was correct and we might have been learning in class about a whole different type of DNA. The structure would not be known as a double-helix because everyone would have thought it had three strands, and base pairing between nitrogen bases would look much different and I imagine probably more complex, as would the process of protein synthesis and DNA replication. In translation during protein synthesis, it would be much more complex to code for amino acids because more than one anticodon and tRNA molecule would be needed. Base pairing rules would be much more complex because there would need to be combinations of three complementary nitrogen bases instead of combinations of
I chose to read the book Brilliant Blunders by Mario Livio. This book was mainly focused upon the mistakes that famous scientists made that actually came to be very significant in their respective fields of study, hence the title Brilliant Blunders. It concerns the work of five scientists in particular: Charles Darwin, William Thomson, Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle, and last but certainly not least Albert Einstein.
Albert Einstein wrote in a letter in 1915 about the most common ways a scientist makes mistakes. These were that they created a false hypothesis or that their arguments are invalid or not logical. Many people agreed with this and many also disagreed, arguing that every science makes mistakes and that Einstein himself made these same mistakes on multiple …show more content…
Pauling had stumbled when he was perceiving DNA to have three interwoven strands instead of two. I find it very interesting that if Watson and Crick had not also been working to discover the structure and Pauling had not caught that he made an error, then people might have thought that he was correct and we might have been learning in class about a whole different type of DNA. The structure would not be known as a double-helix because everyone would have thought it had three strands, and base pairing between nitrogen bases would look much different and I imagine probably more complex, as would the process of protein synthesis and DNA replication. In translation during protein synthesis, it would be much more complex to code for amino acids because more than one anticodon and tRNA molecule would be needed. Base pairing rules would be much more complex because there would need to be combinations of three complementary nitrogen bases instead of combinations of