You’ve all read about the death of Ian Wilmut. For many, this name means nothing. But just call him “father of Dolly the sheep” to understand who he was: the scientist who cloned the first mammal in 1996. (here is an article by Paolo Virtuani). Dolly the Sheep was named after the singer Dolly Parton (if you don’t remember her, she is the author of the song “I Will Always Love You”, which became famous especially with Whitney Houston in the nineties.
However, even Dolly (the sheep, not the singer) had already died many years ago (she is perhaps the only one of her kind whose place and date of birth and death we are sure of: Roslyn, July 5, 1996, Roslyn, 14 years old). February 2003). The detail that is worth paying attention to is the following: if the sheep was cloned in 1996, then its existence became known to the world only in 1997.
Dolly represents the perfect metaphor for the double in science: duplication (of life) as error. The horror of Frankenstein’s monster appears to have remained buried in the ashes. Fear of repeating life: a theme that accompanies the birth of robots as simulacra of humans, as well as today’s debates about artificial intelligence (I wrote about this here in an issue on robots called: We Robots: Is it intuition that comes first or the technology that makes it possible?). Even today we seem to wonder: will copying the human brain open an abyss from which we will never escape?
The theme of doubles also returns here: Darwin wrote down in his notebooks a dream he had on September 21, 1838, at his London home at 36 Great Marlborough Street. It was the famous double execution in which a man (himself) suffered. The doppelgänger also goes back to Fermi: when he broke the uranium atom into two in his first experiments, he thought he had found two new elements called hesperium and ausonium (I wrote about this in a previous episode of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, here ).
On the other hand, the doppelgänger, as a double error prone to self-elimination, permeates literature: as in Arthur Schnitzler’s Double Dream, the book that inspired Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. “No dream is just a dream,” says Nicole Kidman at the end of the film. Not to mention Italo Calvino’s double with the half viscount. The scientific literature is replete with examples of the importance of error and the inadequacy of the definition of failure.
The first ever Nobel Prize winner in 1901, Wilhelm Roentgen, – as Massimiano Bucci recalls in the excellent brochure “The Nativity of Science, History of Discovery and Amazement”, published in bookstores by Interlinea – did not show any particular inclination to study during his student years. After all, at the age of seventeen he was even expelled from school. Moreover, this is a mistake on the part of the institution, given that in this case the student was not the real person responsible for the object of the accusation, a caricature of a teacher. A similar fate befell Alan Turing, who was tortured during his school years by the harsh English professors of the time for his “inability” to keep his notebooks in order (he was dysgraphic).. Growing up, Roentgen discovered X-rays (and not by mistake, as is commonly believed: the most famous at the end of a long series of experiments).
For his part, Alan Turing will ask himself the question of the century: will computers ever be able to think along with the lesser-known John von Neumann, considered the last of the great mathematicians and one of the pillars of the Manhattan Project? . The root of the problem is that mistakes and failures are often assessed in the short term rather than in the medium or long term. Of course, as John Maynard Keynes said to defend the charge brought against his theories that they were the basis of economic policies useful only in the short term (the Great Recession of 1929), in the long term “we will all be dead.”
But this is far from a joke; this is often the fate of innovators.
Ignaz Semmelweis died depressed after being isolated by other doctors in the nineteenth century for discovering that simply washing the hands of midwives before childbirth could save the lives of babies and mothers. A similar fate befell Charles Goodyear, a self-taught father in the field of vulcanization. The same double fallacy paradigm, that is, treating something as a mistake that is not a mistake at all (hence the mirage of a mistake), actually applies to many other areas.
In 1911, the Norwegian Roald Amundsen became the first person to reach the South Pole on the Fram after a long preparation of the expedition to the North Pole. On September 7, 1909, he read in the New York Times that Robert Peary had already touched the tip of the Arctic. Another mistake. Today we know that Frederick Cook had already reached the North Pole about a year earlier, in April 1908. Indeed, there are also doubts as to whether Peary ever reached this exact location. The New York Times error thus propelled Amundsen to Antarctic fame (if he had not read it, he would have risked being second, if not third, on the Arctic list).
In the historiography of mistakes we might also risk including Winston Churchill, who was presumed dead at the end of the First World War for mistakes committed at the Gallipoli front. Twenty years later he would become the greatest prime minister of the twentieth century, the man who managed to block Nazism and Hitler before Pearl Harbor, the hitherto reserved President of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt telling him: “We are now on the same boat.”
But perhaps the most important double mistake in history, that is, always a mistake that negates itself and leads to a positive solution, was the mistake of Dante Alighieri. The great poet in his youth took part in the famous Battle of Campaldino between the Guelphs and Ghibellines on June 11, 1289. Cecco Angiolieri was also involved, and if he had been “fire” he would have made the mistake of setting it on fire. Dante began with Campaldino the political career that would later cause his exile (the worst mistake of his life was the betrayal of his friend Guido Cavalcanti).“How someone else’s bread tastes salty, and how hard it is to go up and down someone else’s stairs,” Dante himself will predict to his ancestor Cacciaguida. Meanwhile, it was in this painful exile that he wrote “Comedy.” Another paragraph in the history of the doppelganger: as historian Jacques Le Goff wrote, the afterlife was divided into two parts, Heaven and Hell, until the Middle Ages were “invented” in the Middle Ages between the 12th and 13th centuries.
And therefore the opportunity to atone for one’s guilt (if this is a mistake, then even in this case the result was positive: the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, painted with frescoes by Giotto, dates back to the beginning of the fourteenth century. Born precisely out of hope, the family of Scrovegni moneylenders, able to redeem their guilt. In the corner frescoes you can see a family offering the church the chapel itself in miniature).
Laziness is the worst sin of man and at the same time the most forgivable. The truth is that no one knows what will happen tomorrow unless we use Dante’s trick and write it later. Steve Jobs himself made this the cornerstone of his famous Stanford University commencement speech: Only by looking back can you connect the dots. Even Newton was wrong about something: gravity, as we know since Einstein, is more about sliding along the curvature of spacetime than a force that pulls us from below. The statues of Christopher Columbus, centuries later, are defaced because, having made his first mistake, discovering America in search of Asia, he would make another: sending European “guns, steel and disease” to the detriment of the indigenous population (Jared Diamond). However, the biggest economic mistake was made by King Charles II of England, who gave William Penn, in exchange for the 16-pound debt he then owed his father, Admiral Sir William Penn, land in northern Maryland. Thus Pennsylvania was born.
The gold miners were also wrong: San Francisco’s first millionaire was Samuel Brannan, who sold them panning tools during the rush of 1849 (a rush he fueled with his newspapers). Finally, artificial intelligence makes mistakes too. In December 2018, artificial intelligence software AlphaZero—a variant of the more famous AlphaGo, known for defeating Chinese checkers world champion Lee Sedol in 2016—managed to defeat the most powerful commercial chess program, StockFish 8, with what Kasparov called “foreign moves” : for example, moving a white pawn to h5-h6 to “attack” the enemy king in castling. This is a move that is not related to solving the problem, and is obviously almost useless. The pawn alone can’t do anything. Black can respond in two ways: a) the black pawn on g7-h6, if he is a very bad player who cannot resist the temptation to strike (this leaves a clear channel leading directly to his king); B) black pawn on g7-g6 to avoid White’s move on h6-g7. In fact, this move tends to disorient the opponent. This is the chaos “algorithm” with which Michael Chang was able to beat Ivan Lendl at Roland Garros in 1989 with an underhand shot (for those who haven’t read, we talked about this a few months ago in more detail in the first episode dedicated to artificial intelligence. Here it is) A mistake in reality can be costly. The first edition of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 contains a misprint (“species”), making multiple copies even more valuable.
In chaos there is always opportunity. But it is a mistake to think that Churchill said this. Sun Tzu already wrote about this in The Art of War.