Hubble scientist and best selling author Mario Livio spoke on campus Wednesday about the importance of thinking outside the box and making brilliant mistakes.

The Society of Yeager Scholars Symposium featured a lecture in which Livio, a theo-retical astrophysicist, spoke about the significance of great mistakes in the history of science.

Livio said his lecture is heavily concentrated on his most recent book, “Brilliant Blunders.”

“In this book, I discuss major blunders made by five giant scientists,” Livio said. “In my lecture, I am only discussing three of the scientists, their blunders and what they were. Also, I want to correct the impression that progress in science is sort of a direct path from A to B, which really isn’t correct. Basically, big mistakes and false starts are part of the process, and I want to convey that to encourage more outside the box thinking.”

Livio said while mistakes are not essential to science, they are definitely a part of it.

“The word ‘essential’ seems to imply that you absolutely have to make mistakes in science,” Livio said. “That, of course, is not the case. But it is certainly a part of all creative thinking and not just in science. Basically, if you want people to think in an unconventional way and you want people to take some calculated risks, then every now and then people are going to make a mistake, and sometimes they’re brilliant.”

Livio said while mistakes are important, they should not be made out of carelessness.

“There are mistakes that are made because people are sloppy, or inexperienced, or not thoughtful enough,” Livio said. “This is why my book is called “Brilliant Blunders.” It’s those mistakes that are made because people were trying to think outside the box in thoughtful ways. Those are the mistakes that I want to encourage.”

During the lecture, Livio discussed the blunders of Charles Darwin. He said Dar-win did not realize his theory of natural selection would not work with the idea of blending inheritance, which Darwin believed to be true. Later, after Mendel’s research surfaced, Darwin then accepted blending inheritance was not viable.

Livio said another scientist, chemist Linus Pauling, could not accurately theorize the structure of DNA because he did not follow Erwin Chargaff’s rule. Pauling did not follow Chargaff’s rules be-cause he hated Chargaff and fell victim to his own previous success.

Einstein’s theory of relativity, according to Livio, was changed and rearranged and Einstein did not realize the mistakes he made in an at-tempt to satisfy the theory to coincide with other theories in physics.

Livio described a brilliant blunder, not included in the lecture, made by the astro-physicist Fred Hoyle.

“He came up with this model for the universe that was called the Steady State model,” Livio said. “The idea was that the universe is, and always will be, in a steady state with basically nothing changing. Hoyle did know that the universe is expanding, so for it not to change, new matter had to appear in the universe. So he wrote some equations that included a term in them that was creating new matter in universe. The idea itself was brilliant, only it turned out to be wrong.”

Livio is a astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is the institute that operates the Hubble Space Telescope and will launch the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope in 2018. He also writes the blog for the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is regularly published by the Huffington Post.

Livio said he was a theo-retical astrophysicist and professor of physics in Israel at the Isreal Institute of Tech-nology before joining the STSI.

“At some point, shortly after the launch of the Hubble, the institute asked me if I would be interested in a position there, and I thought if you are

an astrophysicist, then that is the place to be once Hubble was launched in 1990,” Livio said.

Sarah Legg, senior biology major and Yeager Scholar, said she was able to contact Livio and get him to speak for the So-ciety of Yeager Scholars.

“I actually got on to a site

and was able to contact Dr. Livio,” Legg said. “Whenever we started talking, he presented to me the idea of talking about ‘Brilliant Blunders,’ which he said was a very appropriate and approachable topic. I was pretty surprised that I was actu-ally able to contact him because he is such a well-renowned

scientist.”

Anthony Davis can be contacted at [email protected].