Friday, October 10, 2008

Einstein's Mistakes Were The Human Failings of Genius

Norton has published a new book by Hans Ohanian titled "Einstein's Mistakes - The Human Failings of Genius". A Wall Street Journal book review had an interesting sentence: "Mr. Ohanian finds that four out of five of the seminal papers that Einstein produced in the so-called 'miracle-year' of 1905, when we was working as a patent inspector in Zurich, were 'infested with flaws'". Question: if important these important scientific works of Einstein were written sloppily, how about his Office Actions during this period? And if Einstein can't examine a patent application, can anyone? But as Ohanian points out, Einstein is a classic, if not general, example of learning from your mistakes. Something PTO management is utterly incapable of in any frame of reference.