Great Scientific Mistakes Quiz

Answer: About 40 years, from 1912 to 1953. Presented as Britain's missing link, the fossil also flattered the idea that humanity first appeared in Europe. Chemical tests in 1953 revealed a recent human skull combined with an orang-utan jaw, both stained to look old. Who was behind the hoax is still debated.

Answer: About 460 °C, hot enough to melt lead. Its thick clouds suggested a swampy sister planet. The Soviet Venera probes found a hell: a crushing CO₂ atmosphere, 90 times Earth's pressure, and an extreme greenhouse effect that makes it the hottest planet in the solar system.

Answer: He couldn't explain what force moved the continents. Wegener had strong clues: coastlines that fit together, identical fossils and rocks on either side of oceans. But geologists thought it impossible for continents to 'plough' through the seabed. He died in 1930 on an expedition to Greenland, without seeing his idea triumph.

Answer: Gregor Mendel. People thought parents' traits blended like two paints. Mendel saw that a 'vanished' trait could reappear intact in the next generation. Published in 1866, his work went unnoticed and was only rediscovered in 1900: he is now considered the father of genetics.

Answer: His 'biggest blunder'. His equations predicted an expanding or contracting Universe; he added a term to freeze it. When Hubble showed the expansion, Einstein reportedly regretted it, according to physicist George Gamow. The irony: since 1998 a similar constant has been used to explain the accelerating expansion.

Answer: Burning is a combination with oxygen from the air, not the loss of a substance. According to phlogiston theory, a burning body lost an invisible substance. But Lavoisier showed, with careful weighing, that heated metals gain weight by taking up a gas from the air, which he named oxygen. It became one of the foundations of modern chemistry.

Answer: Winds shifting light dust and uncovering or covering darker rocks. In the early 20th century many saw the 'waves of darkening' in the Martian spring as plants growing. The Mariner and Viking probes revealed a desert world swept by winds and dust storms that change the look of the ground.

Answer: As it circled, it should radiate energy and crash into the nucleus in a fraction of a second. According to the laws of electromagnetism, a charge moving in a circle emits light and loses energy. Atoms would therefore be unstable, which contradicts experience. Niels Bohr, then quantum mechanics, solved the problem: the electron can only occupy specific energy levels.

Answer: Skull size doesn't measure intelligence, and the work mainly served to justify prejudice. Scholars measured skull volumes and shapes to rank human populations. These often biased measurements were used to justify colonialism and discrimination. Modern genetics shows that human diversity cannot be divided into distinct, ranked races.

Answer: Edmond Halley. Comparing his observations with Ptolemy's catalogue, Halley found that Sirius, Arcturus and Aldebaran had shifted slightly. Stars have 'proper motion': constellations slowly change shape over millennia, and stars are born, evolve and die.