Subscribe / Renew |
|
Contact Us |
|
► Subscribe to our Free Weekly Newsletter |
home | Welcome, sign in or click here to subscribe. | login |
January 17, 2014
Q. Failures can be ranked from the everyday personal variety — like getting an “F” on a math test — to the larger more historic ones. Can you cite some of the latter type?
A. 1. After Alfred Nobel's invention of dynamite and a newspaper dubbing him the “merchant of death,” he felt like a failure, says Jonathan Keats in Discover magazine. Yet he went on to establish Nobel Prizes in peace, literature and the sciences. Interestingly, “only one scientist has won a Nobel for failing”: Albert Michelson, who searched for the “luminiferous ether” that scientists believed was the carrier of light. He couldn't find it and it took Albert Einstein to finally explain why.
. . .
Previous columns: