Benjamin Dean Lecture: Brilliant Blunders

Dr Mario Livio is a senior astrophysicist at the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute and a bestselling author. He wrote "The Golden Ratio", a highly acclaimed book about mathematics and art for which he received the International Pythagoras Prize and the Peano Prize. His latest literary adventure "Brilliant Blunders" draws on the lives of five renowned scientists. He shows how even these geniuses made major mistakes and how their errors were an essential part of the process of achieving scientific breakthroughs. We all make mistakes, and that includes five of the greatest scientists in history-Charles Darwin, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle, and Albert Einstein. Fred Hoyle, for example, was an eminent astrophysicist who ridiculed an emerging theory about the origin of the universe that he dismissively called "The Big Bang." And the name stuck! Join us to learn more about the Brilliant Blunders that advanced the science of its time. Livio is also the author of such books as "The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved", "Is God a Mathematician?", and "The Accelerating Universe".  Book Signing to follow.