The Relativity of Wrong is a 1988 essay

Essay

An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...

 collection by Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000...

, which takes its title from the most ambitious essay it contains. Like most of the essays Asimov wrote for F&SF Magazine, each one in The Relativity of Wrong begins with an autobiographical anecdote which serves to set the mood. Several of the essays form a sequence explaining the discovery and uses of isotope

Isotope

Isotopes are variants of atoms of a particular chemical element, which have differing numbers of neutrons. Atoms of a particular element by definition must contain the same number of protons but may have a distinct number of neutrons which differs from atom to atom, without changing the designation...

s; the introductory passages in these essays recount Asimov's not particularly pleasant personal relationship with Harold C. Urey, whom he met at Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

.

Title essay

In the title essay, Asimov argues that there exist degrees of wrongness, and being wrong in one way is not necessarily as bad as being wrong in another way. For example, if a child spells the word sugar as "pqzzf", the child is clearly incorrect. Yet, Asimov says, a child who spells the word "shuger" (or in some other phonetic way) is "less wrong" than one who writes a random sequence of letters. Furthermore, a child who writes "sucrose

Sucrose

Sucrose is the organic compound commonly known as table sugar and sometimes called saccharose. A white, odorless, crystalline powder with a sweet taste, it is best known for its role in human nutrition. The molecule is a disaccharide composed of glucose and fructose with the molecular formula...

" or "C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁" completely disregards the "correct" spelling but shows a degree of knowledge about the real thing under study. Asimov proposes that a better test question would ask the student to spell sugar in as many ways as possible, justifying each.

Likewise, believing that the Earth

Earth

Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...

 is a sphere

Sphere

A sphere is a perfectly round geometrical object in three-dimensional space, such as the shape of a round ball. Like a circle in two dimensions, a perfect sphere is completely symmetrical around its center, with all points on the surface lying the same distance r from the center point...

 is less wrong than believing that the Earth is flat

Flat Earth

The Flat Earth model is a belief that the Earth's shape is a plane or disk. Most ancient cultures have had conceptions of a flat Earth, including Greece until the classical period, the Bronze Age and Iron Age civilizations of the Near East until the Hellenistic period, India until the Gupta period ...

, but wrong nonetheless, since it is really an oblate spheroid or a reasonable approximation thereof. As the state of knowledge advanced, the statement of the Earth's shape became more refined, and each successive advance required a more careful and subtle investigation. Equating the wrongness of the theory that the Earth is flat with the wrongness of the theory that the Earth is a perfect sphere is Wronger than wrong

Wronger than wrong

Michael Shermer has called "wronger than wrong" Asimov's Axiom, after the noted author Isaac Asimov, who discussed the issue in his book of essays, The Relativity of Wrong. A statement that equates two errors is wronger than wrong when one of the errors is clearly wronger than the other...

.

Asimov wrote "The Relativity of Wrong" in response to an "English major" who criticized him for believing in Scientific progress

Scientific progress

Scientific progress is the idea that science increases its problem solving ability through the application of some scientific method.-Discontinuous Model of Scientific Progress:...

. This unnamed individual took the postmodern

Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...

 viewpoint that all scientific explanations of the world are equally in error. Irritated, the rationalist

Rationalism

In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" . In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"...

Asimov put forth his views in his monthly F&SF column, and the result became the title essay of this collection.