It can’t be the worst thing in history, but an anonymous technician in Arizona cut the wrong power line (or maybe flipped the wrong switch), leading by chain-reaction to the worst power outage in San Diego’s history, which also affected nearby counties, and areas in Arizona and Mexico.
Also, Brian Alford made fun of my haircut when we were in 3rd grade. The repercussions haven’t really gotten of the ground yet, but I promise when they do, they will be earth shattering!
“Don’t worry Gen. Custer, there’s not that many Indians at Little Bighorn.”
“Climate change? What climate change?” - Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Okla), set to become the new chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, giving him a firm grip on US environmental policy.
How about… When Rommel got caught with his pants down on D-Day?
Didn’t Rommel place a person to person call to Hitler with a request to release those reserve Panzer divisions?
I think it’s very likely that we’ll never know the worst single-person mistake because #1 most disasters involve multiple mistakes by multiple people, or at least the one mistake should have been caught by someone else, and that failure to catch the mistake is itself another mistake, and possibly the disaster would have happened eventually anyway even if the mistake hadn’t been made. And #2 mistakes made by just one person could probably be covered up by that same person. If I forgot to mail my taxes and it caused my business to go bankrupt, I wouldn’t exactly go around telling everybody about it.
I’m not saying we should give up, but this is a really hard question.
Can I get a second opinion on this from someone more experienced than me? My understanding was that the Cosmological Constant was proved to be non-zero in 1990s.
Also, you can hardly fault him for a name as awesome as the “Cosmological Constant”. It’s like straight out of a comic book.
According to Richard Feynman it was a decision, so not within the rules of the OP. Engineers were worried that the rings would fail in freezing temperatures, but an administrator (or two or three) overruled them. Utter assholes.
Every holocaust denier, every climate change denier, every creationist is making a horrible factual error.
Poor bastard tried asking Hitler himself, before invasion came and he was recalled. “The most urgent problem is to win the Fuhrer over by personal conversation,” he wrote in his diary.
Von Rundstedt eventually persuaded Hitler to authorise the panzers, if memory serves, although he along with Guderian and von Schweppenburg disagreed with Rommel in the use of Panzers. Rommel feared Allied air power, quite rightly - he was later wounded by a strafing Spitfire.
Speaking of you-know-who, he made a rather large factual error when he said of the Soviet Union “We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.”
May I posit the 1985 Chicago-area salmonella outbreak from Hillfarm/Bluebrook Milk? Somewhere the raw milk contacted the pasteurized milk: there were a lot of debates about how it happened, but faulty piping design and cleaning practice/design caused over 150,000 cases of salmonellosis.
Normally there’s only one person involved in the cleaning cycle, but engineering wasn’t failsafe, either.
To be fair, he didn’t say which rotten structure.
Let’s not let the anti-vaxxers off either.
Lt. Kermit A. Tyler, the officer in charge of the Opana Point radar station on Dec. 7, 1941. When informed by the operators on duty that there was a whole mess of airplanes approaching the island, Tyler assumed it was a scheduled convoy of six B-17s.
In my lifetime?
“Saddam got nukes”
On November 9th 1979, somebody at NORAD put a simulation tape into a computer, not realizing it was hooked up to the main computer. It looked like a real Soviet attack and nearly caused us to retaliate, basically starting WW3.
Not sure if this counts because the WW3 didn’t actually happen that day. But in math, we have something called the “expected value” where you multiply the probability of an event times the outcome of that event, so if there’s a 2% chance of killing 800 million people, that’s the same as a 50% chance of killing 32 million people or a 100% chance of killing 16 million people.
What about the Cutter Incident? A director at Cutter laboratories, whose name eludes me, decided, in spite of contractual obligations, not to follow Jonas Salk’s very specific directions for building a filter for manufacturing their polio vaccine, and produced more than 100,000 doses of vaccine that actually gave people polio (you know the anti-vaxxers don’t do much real research, and mostly just make up stuff, because they never mention this), and not just polio, but contagious polio that started several epidemics in the US. Not many people died, but a heck of a lot were paralyzed.
A note on vax vs. anti-vax: the speed at which the incident was identified and addressed, and the bad vaccines pulled, and the fact that Cutter labs never made another, shows what happens when a vaccine really is bad, as opposed to some anti-vax fantasy.
I dont think it would have made much difference.
I dont think anyone ever said that.
Not just the environment in general, to HUMAN BEINGS in particular. There is very overwhelming correlative evidence that lead in the air from gasoline cause America’s violent crime epidemic.
Again, not a mistake, a bad** decision**.