You guys have these romantic notions of geniuses, but truth is many of these scientist were in a competition to formulate the same theories.
Darwin wrote his theory of natural selection, other scientist were publishing the same independently a bit later based on their own research. Some had touched the idea long before.
When one man invented the telephone, other people who were in the race to invent the telephone too had lost.
New science and research opens doors and scientist decide to join the race to discover things. Scientist competed to discover DNA, the Atomic theory. They were in the scientific community, surrounded by people studying similar things and using each other’s research.
All the early internet entrepreneurs came from the same school on the same cities and they were all racing to create the same things.
People were competing with Einstein and Einstein used many recent theories and data from his age to iterate a newer theory. Everyone in his era was focused on doing the same thing, making a model that explained the data and mixing other theories and data.
Internet allows communities to spring up all over the world irrespective of geographical locations but you have to engage and follow up with the trends.
Same way people nowadays are racing to create self driving cars, countries, companies and schools are competing. We know it’s gonna happen, one will do it first. The others will be forgotten.
And we will say in 20- - a genius had the idea to invent the self driving car.
If you are sitting in your basement without making an effort…
Also, I don’t know if you guys have noticed that every research paper, every Nobel prize winner for a long time have been teams of PhD’s with expensive softwares, proprietary data, equipements, assistants.
There still are a couple of lone geniuses but it’s rarer and rarer and less and less important.
It takes an army of people to make smaller improvements. Despite not making most of the hardware themselves, despite not assembling the products, companies like Apple have tens of thousands of highly squirmed engineers.
You go to a restaurant, on guy makes the sauce, one guys marinates the meat, one guy grills it, one guy handles the bar, one takes the order.
One handles the graphic designs, one handle the UX, then electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, manufacturing engineers, supply chain analyst, lawyers, accountant, managers, HR.
One doctor for the heart (cardiologist) one doctor for the brain (neurologist), one doctor for the lungs etc… then there is a doctor who specializes in the body area and the disease, a brain cancer specialist, a lung cancer specialist.
An anesthesiologist, a radiography specialist, thousands of people who handle their tiny area of expertise. That’s how the world works guys.
It takes 15 countries on average to make a basic blue Jean in the modern world.
Iron Man is a fictional character, he outsmart the whole world on his own. Dream is an interdimensional wizard/being.
But in real life, stuff is hard and complicated.
You have the tools here to smash Einstein in potential, by far, but it will still not be easy like in the movies or as glamorous. The truth is often too boring for audiences.
There was a time where we knew almost nothing, now we’re exploring deep space and subatomic particles. We create nano tools now.
Once everything was a discovery, everything was new, but we’ve been discovering and exploring for a while now.
We need to do more and go further to achieve the same level of improvements as before.
We don’t start the game knowing what we try to discover or invent, it’s a journey. You focus on something and you learn as you explore. But you need to work on it.
Flashes of insight happen when you know what problem you are trying to solve and you’ve been working on it for a while.