In Praise of Error: Productive Mistakes in Culture, Cuisine and Science

By Derek Mueller

Many people know that Columbus wouldn't have dared to sail across the Atlantic if he had been aware how far the way to Asia really is. But there exist a lot more errors which turned out to be useful. Great thinkers like Copernicus and Einstein, but also ordinary people made mistakes which changed our world in many ways.

A collection of the most interesting and useful errors in history, science, kitchen and art.

Contents:
Errors – always negative?
To err as a program? Trial and error or: What geniuses and rainworms have in common
Mistakes? How delicious! – Potato crisps and cauliflower
The great fried potatoes failure
Tofu, cheese, wine & Co.
Cauliflower and beyond
In wine there is error
Copernicus or: a rounder rounding
… and Kepler
Discovering America with Aristotle
El Dorado: the mirage of greed
Dreams, lies and literature: Schliemann
Creative misunderstandings in literature
Kandinsky or: The right wrong view
Only relatively right assumptions: theory of relativity
Unsuccessful, but still a masterpiece: the Michelson–Morley experiment
A bit of theory on error
Sloppiness saves the lives of millions
Can false prophecies be useful?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ideenbrücke Verlag
• Release date: Nov 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9783961501755

Book preview

Contents  

Useful Errors

Introduction

Errors – always negative?

To err as a program? Trial and error or: what geniuses and earthworms have in common

Mistakes? How delicious! – Potato crisps and cauliflower

The great fried potatoes failure

Tofu, cheese, wine & Co.

Cauliflower and beyond

In wine there is error

Copernicus or: a rounder rounding

… and Kepler

Discovering America with Aristotle

El Dorado: the mirage of greed

Dreams, lies and literature: Schliemann

Creative misunderstandings in literature

Kandinsky or: The right wrong view

Only relatively right assumptions: theory of relativity

Unsuccessful, but still a masterpiece: the Michelson–Morley experiment

A bit of theory on error

Sloppiness saves the lives of millions

Can false prophecies be useful?

Conclusion

References and further reading

Introduction

To err is human – a truism. 

To err is useful – what’s that supposed to mean?

The first sentence, a Roman saying, is obviously true. The second one fits only sometimes. Nevertheless, it contains more truth than one might think at first sight. It is the core of this book: You will hear about rainworms straying in the soil, about conquerors straying in the rainforest, about scientists straying in the jungle of theories.       Not all of them will find their goal, some of them not even know for sure what they are looking for. But they all have something in common: In the very end, there will be some use for someone – not always for the straying person, often for certain groups, sometimes for humankind as a whole.

Truth has been praised often enough. It is about time to laud errors, too. In contrast to Erasmus of Rotterdam’s famous „In Praise of Folly", I don’t mean this ironically in the first place.

I’m not the first one to stroll on this strange ground. A few years ago, the German philosopher Jürgen Mittelstraß published a paper called „The perks of error in science". To him I owe several examples. I wanted to offer an introduction to this topic which is easy to read for as many people as possible. And I wanted to show that there are many places, often far away from science, where you can find productive errors and misunderstandings.   

This book doesn’t stick to a strict chronological order, neither there is an underlying traditional system of fields of study. You will find a mix of easy and complicated topics, with some principal thoughts added. Sometimes we even step back from a later to an earlier idea.           This happens on purpose. It’s a journey through the jungle of knowledge and creative non-knowledge. Error shall be our compass, its many consequences our map.        

Errors – always negative?

The smooth black balls sparkled seductively. The exhausted leader Hork took a closer look at the dark, shining fruits on the rank bush. For days, he and his clan hat eaten only shrivelled roots on their way to new hunting grounds. But now: a feast! He called his family and started to eat.

His wife Ondu hesitated, though. There was something creepy about thins unknown fruit – so shiny and so dark at the same time, as if bewitched by spirits … and these five petals around each fruit, like claws clutching at anyone attempting to steal the plant’s lustre …  

A short time later, Hork was winding in febrile convulsions, fantasizing about monsters and demons tracking him. He lapsed into a coma. He didn’t wake up again.

The dose of alkaloids in the belladonna fruits had been lethal. But his family should live – maybe they belong to our ancestors.                 There are mistakes whose effects are entirely negative for those who’ve made them: for example, to eat a lethally poisonous plant, in particular in a time without modern medicine.                                     However, for the bereaved, the unsuccessful meal wasn’t completely negative: On one hand, they lose a relative, maybe an important one. On the other hand, they will be immune against making the same mistake – provided the poison takes its effects fast enough to be allocated properly. Slow, insidious poisonings can remain undetected for centuries: For example, the ancient Romans used to refine their wine with lead acetate, a chemical also known as lead sugar because of its taste. The poison took its lethal effect so slowly that people didn’t recognize it. Centuries later, the wine-loving composer Ludwig van Beethoven probably died because of chronic lead sugar intoxication.   

We have to bear in mind that our present, extensive knowledge on medicine is based to a great part on the often lethally negative experiences our ancestors made. On the other hand, generations to come will probably profit of quite a number of blunders we’re making at present – provided that they stay adaptive.                         These errors are useful for others: fine (for them). Humans profit here of their unique capability to pass cultural knowledge over many generations. Nature, however, has similar techniques. We will hear more about this later on.                                                                         Maybe you’ve noticed: In a certain sense, Hork’s story contains another error, even a double mistake, but one which is useful for the person making it. Hork’s wife erroneously believes that  it’s possible to conclude from colors and forms of nature to spirits and demons – and, without further examination, to forecast dangers on this basis. In this single case, Ondu was right. So this error is useful because it saves her and