No one should be in any doubt that scientists can blunder, just like anyone else.
Many doctoral theses have lost a crucial, un-backed-up section due to late-night fat fingers. In Smashing Physics I wrote about the first, abortive attempt to start up the Large Hadron Collider in 2008 – not to mention a proton decay experiment that accidentally siphoned a cesspit into its (previously) clean detector volume.
None of those are especially productive mistakes – though sometimes the rewritten thesis can be an improvement, and we did do some useful work while the LHC was repaired. In any case, blunders are an inevitable, integral part of the scientific process, as Mario Livio will argue in this public lecture this evening. He will describe some notable mistakes of famous scientists, and attempt to explain how they happen.
