In fact, he is so famous for his brilliance that "Einstein" is synonymous with "genius." But being a genius doesn't mean you're infallible. So was Einstein wrong about anything?
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As a result, Einstein changed his mind and decided that gravitational waves couldn't exist. He wrote up his results and submitted them to the journal Physical Review, which had recently begun sending papers to outside experts for peer review. An anonymous reviewer caught an error in Einstein's math, and when Einstein learned about it, he was so furious that he withdrew the paper and submitted it to a different journal.
Without Einstein's knowledge, the reviewer befriended and demonstrated the error to Einstein's assistant, who explained it to Einstein. Einstein corrected the error and republished the paper with the opposite conclusion, showing that gravitational waves do, in fact, exist.
Einstein originally thought that gravitational waves existed, then changed his mind when the math didn't work out. However, an anonymous peer reviewer named Howard Percy Robertson managed to secretly help Einstein fix his mathematical errors. (Image credit: MARK GARLICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY via Getty Images)"Einstein remained skeptical of the existence of black holes," John D. Norton, a professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, told Live Science in an email. "He was resolute in his judgment that there would be a singularity in space-time already at the event horizon of a black hole, which is now merely regarded as marking the point of no return for those falling into a black hole."
"He was unmoved by alternative analyses that found his mathematical infinities to be merely artifacts of the particular mathematical methods he preferred," Norton said.
Einstein was skeptical of the existence of black holes (pictured here in a 3D render) because his math showed a breakdown in space-time at a black hole's edge. (Image credit: Cavan Images / Luca Pierro via Getty Images)Einstein and quantum mechanics
Einstein thought this instantaneous phenomenon seemed to violate special relativity, which says that nothing can travel faster than light. As a result, he believed quantum mechanics must be incomplete and that there was some deeper, unknown description of reality that would restore order.
"Today, a lot of the technology that we have relies on quantum mechanics, and so we know it's correct," Yunes said. "But it's still incompatible with general relativity, with [Einstein's] classical theory."
Related stories"It's possible that general relativity is wrong," Yunes said. "It's also possible that quantum mechanics is not the right description when you're talking about systems that are very strongly gravitating and you're looking at Planck-scale-type dynamics," which are incredibly small scales at which quantum effects dominate. For instance, the center of a black hole, which is both compressed to the quantum scale but also sits inside the most intense gravitational field in the universe, is a place where general relativity predicts a singularity that quantum mechanics has no way to describe.
Einstein's mistakes might come as a surprise to others, but they didn't to him. Once, when writing a book with his collaborator Leopold Infeld, Infeld told him he was taking special care with it because Einstein's name would appear on it. Einstein laughed and said, "There are incorrect papers under my name, too."
See how much you know about Albert Einstein with our Einstein quiz!
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