Leading Physicist Admits He Once Told Students Their Great Ideas Were Wrong

What was said

"Many times I've told my students that what they said were wrong and they ended up being great ideas. A person called Eitor Leikowicz came with an interesting generalization of this formula for the Ryu and Takayanagi that we were talking about. And I said, well, I thought it was probably wrong. And not justified. But in the end it was correct. Unfortunately he didn't publish it. The other people published it. So that was one of my failures as an advisor."

Juan Maldacena revealed that one of his PhD students proposed a major generalization of the Ryu-Takayanagi formula for black hole entropy, which Maldacena initially rejected as incorrect. The idea turned out to be valid but the student never published, and others later claimed credit. Maldacena described this as one of his failures as an advisor, offering a rare glimpse into how breakthrough physics can be dismissed even by top experts.