Mario Livio, an astrophysicist who works at the Space Telescope Science Institute located on the campus of the Johns Hopkins University, was on “The Daily Show” on Wednesday night.
He was talking about his new book: “Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein — Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe.”
“There is this big misconception that scientific progress is some sort of direct march to the truth,” Livio told show host Jon Stewart. “Nothing really can be further from the truth.”
Livio said his book is about “big scientists making big mistakes,” and highlights tales of Albert Einstein and other prominent scientists as they made monumental discoveries — “breakthroughs,” in Livio’s telling — in haphazard ways.
Watch Mario Livio on “The Daily Show”:
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