Perhaps more than any other profession, science places a premium on being correct. Of course, most scientists make plenty of mistakes 1 the way. Yet not all errors are created equal. Historians have 2 a number of instances in which an incorrect idea proved far more 3 than thousands of others that were trivially mistaken or 4 correct. These are the productive mistakes: errors that 5 on deep, fundamental features of the world around us and 6 further research that leads to major 7 . Mistakes they certainly are. But science would be far worse off without them.
Niels Bohr, for example, created a 8 of the atom that was wrong in nearly every way, yet it 9 the quantum-mechanical revolution. 10 enormous skepticism, Alfred Wegener argued 11 centrifugal forces make the continents move (or "drift") along the surface of the earth. He had the right phenomenon, albeit the wrong 12 . And Enrico Fermi thought that he had created nuclei heavier than uranium, rather than (as we now know) having stumbled 13 nuclear fission.
Two other instances of productive mistakes, one from physics in the 1970"s and one from biology in the 1940"s illustrate this 14 dramatically. The authors of the mistakes were not hapless bumblers who 15 , in retrospect, to get lucky. 16 they steadfastly asked questions that 17 of their colleagues broached and 18 ideas that not many at the time had considered. In the process, they 19 the critical groundwork for today"s burgeoning fields of biotechnology and quantum information science. They were 20 , and the world should be thankful for their errors.