Oops!

This year's Nobel Prizes in the sciences were recently announced, and one of the interesting things about the prize is that because sometimes it honors cutting-edge scientific discoveries it is given for something that turns out to be wrong.

Real Clear Science's "Newton Blog" notes a few of those here, and while a couple of the ones it lists are pretty obscure, at least one of them is rather high profile. Enrico Fermi, the Italian physicist who created the first nuclear reactor, was awarded the 1938 Nobel for physics. Fermi said that by bombarding the elements thorium and uranium with slow neutrons, he had created two new elements. It turns out he had made his original substances change into new elements, but it was by nuclear fission and they actually turned into previously existing elements. When confronted with experimental verification of his mistake, Fermi added a footnote to his Nobel acceptance speech that indicated the change.

Of course, the mistake is what led Fermi to subsequent experiments that allowed him to create the first nuclear reactor with a self-sustaining reaction -- meaning it could keep itself going without requiring extra energy to be pumped in. In science, incorrect answers are rarely dead ends and often serve more as signposts towards new directions than anything else.

One might wish for that kind of happy circumstance when the Nobel committee makes similar mistakes in other award areas, but its members have of late proven relatively impervious to self-awareness. With a couple of welcome exceptions, of course.