# What is the worst single factual mistake ever made by one person? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [November 10, 2014, 7:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-worst-single-factual-mistake-ever-made-by-one-person/704221 "2014-11-10T07:29:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Leo\_Bloom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leo_bloom/32/10377_2.png) [@Leo\_Bloom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leo_Bloom)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2014, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-worst-single-factual-mistake-ever-made-by-one-person/704221/21 "2014-11-10T15:01:14Z")
> [@GreasyJack](#): > > Columbus’ first voyage (which of course led to _the deaths of millions and millions of native peoples)_ was essentially based on a Mars Climate Observer-style unit conversion error which led him to underestimate the circumference of the Earth and thus the distance west to Asia. italics added. Cite? ---
**Author:** ![GreasyJack](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/df705f/32.png) [@GreasyJack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreasyJack)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2014, 3:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-worst-single-factual-mistake-ever-made-by-one-person/704221/22 "2014-11-10T15:06:00Z")
> [@Leo\_Bloom](#): > > italics added. > Cite? Well, not by him personally, but he got the ball rolling. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Joker\_and\_the\_Thief](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e79b87/32.png) [@The\_Joker\_and\_the\_Thief](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Joker_and_the_Thief)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2014, 3:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-worst-single-factual-mistake-ever-made-by-one-person/704221/23 "2014-11-10T15:25:28Z")
> [@GreasyJack](#): > > Well, not by him personally, but he got the ball rolling. But that ball was fated to roll. Most of the deaths were unintentional and due to diseases, which we didn’t really understand at the time, too. There’s no plausible alternative scenario where millions of Native Americans don’t die sooner or later. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2014, 3:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-worst-single-factual-mistake-ever-made-by-one-person/704221/24 "2014-11-10T15:29:11Z")
Since “worst” is a matter of opinion, let’s move this to IMHO. Colibri General Questions Moderator ---
**Author:** ![chappachula](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/d2c977/32.png) [@chappachula](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chappachula)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2014, 3:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-worst-single-factual-mistake-ever-made-by-one-person/704221/25 "2014-11-10T15:32:36Z")
> [@GreasyJack](#): > > Well, not by him personally, but he got the ball rolling. Let’s try to stay on track, folks. When I posted the OP and gave the example of the Hubble telescope…I was asking about specific mistakes which one person made, for which he alone is responsible, _and which at the same moment he made the mistake, he could have corrected_, simply by being more careful.;thus preventing terrible results. I’m not asking about , say, political developments or military decisions which were later found to be wrong, but only due to factors that were unknown at the time the person made the mistake. And it’s interesting that so far, most of the answers have involved outer space… ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2014, 3:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-worst-single-factual-mistake-ever-made-by-one-person/704221/26 "2014-11-10T15:35:50Z")
> [@GreasyJack](#): > > Columbus’ first voyage (which of course led to the deaths of millions and millions of native peoples) was essentially based on a Mars Climate Observer-style unit conversion error which led him to underestimate the circumference of the Earth and thus the distance west to Asia. Columbus’s calculations weren’t really an example of a conversion error, but his own deliberate cherry-picking of available data in order to fit his idea that east Asia was closer to the west to Europe than most people assumed. And the deaths of native Americans due to the introduction of European and African diseases would have happened anyway, even if Columbus had never existed. The discovery of the Americas within a few decades was inevitable (and in fact happened independently in Brazil in 1500), and whenever that happened the introduction of Old World diseases and epidemics among the Native Americans was inevitable. ---
**Author:** ![Blaster\_Master](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/cab0a1/32.png) [@Blaster\_Master](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blaster_Master)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2014, 4:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-worst-single-factual-mistake-ever-made-by-one-person/704221/27 "2014-11-10T16:15:06Z")
I’m going to go with [Thomas Midgley, Jr.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr.) and his invention of leaded gasoline. His factual mistake being vastly underestimating the toxicity to the environment. Even if only a small number of the potentially attributable effects are true, it seems like an awful lot of harm resulting from one man’s mistake. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2014, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-worst-single-factual-mistake-ever-made-by-one-person/704221/28 "2014-11-10T16:21:33Z")
> [@bob\_2](#): > > Thomas Midgley made not one but two, probably the worst errors in the history of the Earth. He was the inventor who put lead in petrol and CFCs in fridges. Kettering and Midgley developed brilliant solutions to the problems of the times they lived in. Those solutions turned out to be imperfect, but I wouldn’t call them “errors” by a long shot. In the case of CFCs, there wasn’t any realization that there was a problem until some 30 years after their introduction. ---
**Author:** ![sbunny8](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c77e96/32.png) [@sbunny8](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sbunny8)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2014, 4:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-worst-single-factual-mistake-ever-made-by-one-person/704221/29 "2014-11-10T16:25:55Z")
> [@chappachula](#): > > I was asking about specific mistakes which one person made, for which he alone is responsible, _and which at the same moment he made the mistake, he could have corrected_, simply by being more careful.;thus preventing terrible results. That knocks the Gimli Glider out of the running, because it involved multiple mistakes made by multiple people. Two different people made the conversion error between pounds and kilograms. One person failed to clearly note in the log what was done with the circuit breaker, another person failed to verbally communicate the status of the circuit breaker, and a third person chose to ignore the Minimum Equipment List. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2014, 4:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-worst-single-factual-mistake-ever-made-by-one-person/704221/30 "2014-11-10T16:39:35Z")
In what category do we put misguided political statements like “There were no major terror attacks under George W. Bush’s presidency”, or “When I was on welfare, the government never did anything to help me out”? And it’s not exactly a “mistake”, since everyone involved knew it was wrong, but the biggest scientific miscalculation ever is easily the attempt to estimate the strength of the cosmological constant from principles of particle physics. We don’t know enough about particle physics to make an exact calculation, but the estimate is approximately 120 orders of magnitude too high (as in, a factor of 1 followed by 120 zeroes). We still don’t know _why_ that calculation is so wrong, but it clearly is. ---
**Author:** ![BrotherCadfael](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@BrotherCadfael](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrotherCadfael)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2014, 5:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-worst-single-factual-mistake-ever-made-by-one-person/704221/31 "2014-11-10T17:08:05Z")
Adolph Hitler, on the invasion of Russia: \*“You only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.” \*\* \* ---
**Author:** ![cochrane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cochrane/32/10441_2.png) [@cochrane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cochrane)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2014, 6:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-worst-single-factual-mistake-ever-made-by-one-person/704221/32 "2014-11-10T18:21:10Z")
> [@Blaster\_Master](#): > > I’m going to go with [Thomas Midgley, Jr.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr.) and his invention of leaded gasoline. His factual mistake being vastly underestimating the toxicity to the environment. Even if only a small number of the potentially attributable effects are true, it seems like an awful lot of harm resulting from one man’s mistake. See [post #12](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=17888176&postcount=12). ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2014, 6:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-worst-single-factual-mistake-ever-made-by-one-person/704221/33 "2014-11-10T18:23:07Z")
> [@Leo\_Bloom](#): > > italics added. > Cite? > **[The Round Earth and Christopher Columbus](https://pwg.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Scolumb.htm)** > > The story of Columbus and early attempts to establish the shape and size of the earth; part of an educational web site on astronomy, mechanics, and space Says: > [@](#): > > Columbus had an estimate of his own. Some historians have proposed that he used an argument like Strabo’s, but Dr. Fischer found his claim to be based on incorrect units of distance. Columbus used an erroneous estimate by Ptolemy (whom we meet again), who based it on a later definition of the stadium, and in estimating the size of the settled world he confused the Arab mile, used by El Ma’mun, with the Roman mile on which our own mile is based. All the same, his final estimate of the distance to India was close to Strabo’s. > > ``` > In the end Queen Isabella overruled the experts, and the rest is history. We may never know whether Columbus knowingly fudged his values to justify an expedition to explore the unknown, or actually believed India was not too far to the west of Spain. He certainly did call the inhabitants of the lands he discovered "Indians," a mislabelling which still persists. > > ``` Basically he took the smallest estimate of the earth’s diameter by the Greeks and Arabs translated it with a different/wrong measure unit, then tallied up how far he thought Marco Polo went east to get to China based on Marco’s memoirs, and came up with a small number (3,000 miles) for the remaining distance to China sailing westward. He had difficulty getting funding because all the smart people of the time knew he was wrong. Spain was willing to try because Portugal had monopolized the African route going east. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2014, 6:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-worst-single-factual-mistake-ever-made-by-one-person/704221/34 "2014-11-10T18:24:34Z")
How about Einstein’s Cosmological Constant? Einstein’s early work on his Theory of Relativity showed the the universe should be expanding. But at the time, everyone felt the universe didn’t change in size. So Einstein “fixed” his work by introducing the arbitrary Cosmological Constant which balanced the equations. A decade later, astronomical observations showed the universe was expanding and his original theory had been correct. The Cosmological Constant was removed and Einstein acknowledged it had been the biggest mistake of his career. ---
**Author:** ![Blaster\_Master](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/cab0a1/32.png) [@Blaster\_Master](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blaster_Master)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2014, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-worst-single-factual-mistake-ever-made-by-one-person/704221/35 "2014-11-10T18:34:34Z")
> [@cochrane](#): > > See [post #12](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=17888176&postcount=12). I thought I read all the posts, I guess I missed it. > [@bump](#): > > Kettering and Midgley developed brilliant solutions to the problems of the times they lived in. Those solutions turned out to be imperfect, but I wouldn’t call them “errors” by a long shot. In the case of CFCs, there wasn’t any realization that there was a problem until some 30 years after their introduction. For CFCs, I can’t really hold him responsible for the environmental damage since there really wasn’t any way it could have been known at his time, which is why I’d left it out. But it was well known at the time that lead was toxic, and the wikipedia article even makes references to him getting treated for lead poisoning. ---
**Author:** ![Son\_of\_a\_Rich](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/son_of_a_rich/32/5439_2.png) [@Son\_of\_a\_Rich](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Son_of_a_Rich)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2014, 6:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-worst-single-factual-mistake-ever-made-by-one-person/704221/36 "2014-11-10T18:35:57Z")
A whole lot of problems could have been avoided if Eve hadn’t eaten that darn apple. ---
**Author:** ![Peter\_Morris](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/peter_morris/32/359_2.png) [@Peter\_Morris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peter_Morris)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2014, 6:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-worst-single-factual-mistake-ever-made-by-one-person/704221/37 "2014-11-10T18:41:39Z")
> [@Leo\_Bloom](#): > > italics added. > Cite? > [@md2000](#): > > [The Round Earth and Christopher Columbus](http://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Scolumb.htm) > > Says: > Basically he took the smallest estimate of the earth’s diameter by the Greeks and Arabs… You are citing the wrong thing. See where Leo added the italics. He’s questioning the claim that Columbus’s error _“led to the deaths of millions and millions of native peoples.”_ ---
**Author:** ![buddha\_david](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ee7513/32.png) [@buddha\_david](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/buddha_david)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2014, 7:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-worst-single-factual-mistake-ever-made-by-one-person/704221/38 "2014-11-10T19:17:17Z")
“Constitutionally, gentlemen, _you have the President, the Vice President, and the Secretary of State in that order,_ and should the President decide he wants to transfer the helm to the Vice President, he will do so. He has not done that. As of now, I am in control here, in the White House.” – Alexander Haig, 1981. Perhaps not so disastrous in the grand scheme of things, but his statement did ultimately ruin Haig’s career. ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2014, 7:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-worst-single-factual-mistake-ever-made-by-one-person/704221/39 "2014-11-10T19:27:58Z")
> [@The\_Joker\_and\_the\_Thief](#): > > But that ball was fated to roll. Most of the deaths were unintentional and due to diseases, which we didn’t really understand at the time, too. There’s no plausible alternative scenario where millions of Native Americans don’t die sooner or later. Fascinating. I’ve read, discussed and written much on this general topic, and this aspect never occurred to me. :smack: About the only way to avoid mass deaths in the New World would be for no outsider to visit until germ theory was understood and vaccines for the worst illnesses developed. In the words of philosopher Jackson Teller, “Ain’t no way that was gonna happen!” ---
**Author:** ![Leo\_Bloom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leo_bloom/32/10377_2.png) [@Leo\_Bloom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leo_Bloom)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2014, 8:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-worst-single-factual-mistake-ever-made-by-one-person/704221/40 "2014-11-10T20:02:21Z")
> [@GreasyJack](#): > > Columbus’ first voyage (which of course led to _the deaths of millions and millions of native peoples_) was essentially based on a Mars Climate Observer-style unit conversion error which led him to underestimate the circumference of the Earth and thus the distance west to Asia. > [@Leo\_Bloom](#): > > italics added. > Cite? > [@md2000](#): > > [The Round Earth and Christopher Columbus](http://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Scolumb.htm) > > Says: > Basically he took the smallest estimate of the earth’s diameter by the Greeks and Arabs translated it with a different/wrong measure unit, then tallied up how far he thought Marco Polo went east to get to China based on Marco’s memoirs, and came up with a small number (3,000 miles) for the remaining distance to China sailing westward. He had difficulty getting funding because all the smart people of the time knew he was wrong. Spain was willing to try because Portugal had monopolized the African route going east. 🙂 [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-worst-single-factual-mistake-ever-made-by-one-person/704221.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-worst-single-factual-mistake-ever-made-by-one-person/704221.md?page=3)