Shortly after Crick and Watson published their discoveries in 1953, Pauling paid them a visit at Cambridge and examined their model of DNA. He acknowledged that they were right and he was wrong, and soon afterward he made the same declaration in public. That kind of graciousness is not universal among Livio’s blunderers, though. The great physicist Lord Kelvin held firm, until his death in 1907, to his conviction that the Earth was only millions of years old.

Kelvin believed that life had been designed, and he investigated the age of the Earth in part to rebut Darwin’s theory of natural selection. If Darwin’s theories were right, then the Earth must be very old, but geologists had no way to precisely measure the planet’s age. Kelvin had the brilliant insight that the temperature of rocks might hold the answer.

The Earth, Kelvin rightly reasoned, had started out as a ball of molten rock. It took a straightforward mathematical exercise to calculate how long it had taken for the Earth to cool to its current temperature. And when Kelvin did the math, he concluded that the Earth was fairly young, roughly 100 million years (we now know it to be about 4.567 billion years old). He carried out similar calculations to work out the comparable age of the Sun. If the Sun had indeed formed billions of years ago, Kelvin believed it would have burned out long ago.

Kelvin was wrong for two reasons. As a former student of his pointed out, Kelvin assumed that the Earth’s interior was fixed and transports heat at the same rate everywhere. In fact, it roils like boiling water, transporting heat to the surface. The other reason for Kelvin’s error was quantum physics. Radioactivity helps keep the Earth warm, and nuclear fusion has allowed the Sun to burn for 4.567 billion years. Kelvin’s critics brought both these counterarguments to his attention, but he seems to have viewed them with contemptuous indifference.

Nuclear fusion doesn’t just power stars, it also creates new elements like carbon and iron. The British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle made this tremendous discovery in the 1940s and ’50s. Unfortunately, Hoyle might be better known for promoting a flawed theory about the origin of the universe: He was convinced that the universe was in a continual state of creation. As evidence for the Big Bang mounted, he became an increasingly embarrassing crank.

Livio chooses Einstein as the fifth member of his blundering quintet. Einstein was puzzled as to why the universe didn’t cave in on itself. Empty space, he suggested, contained a mysterious energy pushing outward, resisting the universe’s inward collapse. After he published this idea — what came to be known as the cosmological constant — he regretted it. He said it didn’t emerge naturally from his equations; he’d tacked it on like a cheap piece of plywood over a hole in a roof.