1. The devil leads him by the nose with a false hypothesis. (For this he deserves our pity.)

2. His arguments are erroneous and sloppy. (For this he deserves a beating.)

Even though Einstein himself certainly committed errors of both types, his unparalleled physical insight showed him, in many cases, the path to the right answers. Unfortunately, we mere mortals can neither imitate nor acquire this talent.

In 1949 Einstein’s collaborator Leopold Infeld described Einstein’s pioneering paper on cosmology this way:

Although it is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this paper . . . Einstein’s original ideas, as viewed from the perspective of our present day, are antiquated if not even wrong . . . Indeed, it is one more instance showing how a wrong solution of a fundamental problem may be incomparably more important than a correct solution of a trivial, uninteresting problem.