I have organized the book in such a way that for each scientist, I first present the essence of some of the theories for which this individual is best known. These are very concise summaries intended to provide an introduction to the ideas of these masters and an appropriate context for the blunders, rather than to represent comprehensive descriptions of the respective theories. I have also chosen to concentrate only on one major blunder in each case instead of reviewing a laundry list of every possible mistake that these pundits may have committed during their long careers. I shall start with the man about whom the New York Times correctly wrote in its obituary notice (published on April 21, 1882) that he “has been read much, but talked about more.”

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

—CHARLES DARWIN

The most striking thing about life on Earth is its prodigious diversity. Take a casual stroll on a spring afternoon; you are likely to encounter several kinds of birds, many insects, perhaps a squirrel, a few people (some may be walking their dogs), and a large variety of plants. Even just in terms of the properties that are the easiest to discern, organisms on Earth differ in size, color, shape, habitat, food, and capabilities. On one hand, there are bacteria that are less than one hundred thousandth of an inch in length, and on the other, there are blue whales more than 100 feet long. Among the thousands of known species of the marine mollusks known as nudibranchs, there are many that are plain looking, while others have some of the most sumptuous colors exhibited by any creature on Earth. Birds can fly at astonishing heights in the atmosphere: On November 29, 1975, a large vulture was sucked into a jet engine at a height of 37,900 feet above the Ivory Coast in West Africa. Other birds, such as the migrating bar-headed geese and the whooper swans, regularly fly higher than 25,000 feet. Not to be outdone, ocean creatures achieve similar records in depth. On January 23, 1960, the record-setting explorer Jacques Piccard and Lieutenant Don Walsh of the US Navy descended slowly in a special probe called a bathyscaphe to the deepest point at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean—the Mariana Trench—south of Guam. When they finally touched down at the record depth of about 35,800 feet, they were amazed to discover around them a new type of bottom-dwelling shrimp that did not seem to be bothered by the ambient pressure of some 17,000 pounds per square inch. On March 26, 2012, film director James Cameron reached the deepest point in the Mariana Trench in a specially designed submersible. He described it as a gelatinous landscape as desolate as the Moon. But he also reported seeing tiny shrimp-like critters no bigger than an inch in length.