“In all probability,” British Economist William Stanley Jevons wrote in 1874, “the errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous one.” Making mistakes turns out to be a strangely generative process: it sends you down a new path, allows an interesting new connection to form in your mind. The history of being spectacularly right has a shadow history lurking behind it: a much longer history of being spectacularly wrong, again and again. (For a rich philosophical take on this subject, I recommend Kathryn Schulz’s book, “Being Wrong.”) And not just wrong, but messy. A shockingly large number of transformative ideas in the annals of science can be attributed to contaminated laboratory environments. Great scientists and inventors seem to have an openness to the serendipitous discoveries that happen when you accidentally knock over the tissue sample, or misinterpret the data from the last experiment. As one great inventor, Ben Franklin, put it: “Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of soul in order to encounter it.
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