Einstein: the lone genius is pure mythology | by Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang! | Oct, 2024

Many mavericks look to Einstein as a unique figure, whose lone genius revolutionized the Universe. The big problem? It isn’t true.

Many of us, when we think about scientists, think them as followers, rather than as trailblazers. Nearly all of them simply gobble up the prevailing wisdom of the day, falling into line by following accepted lines of thinking with barely any imagination at all. Then, in an epic twist, a freethinker comes along — someone with a towering intellect but little-to-no experience, who maybe even lacks a formal education in the field — and they immediately see things that no one else has ever seen before. With just a little bit of hard work, they find solutions to puzzles that have stymied the greatest minds prior to them. This idea of a lone, maverick genius lives on in popular culture. Many of us, as a result, believe that if we had the good fortune of coming into a field just like that, we could be the ones who’d make those great breakthroughs that the world’s greatest professionals had all missed.

That’s the myth we frequently tell ourselves about “lone geniuses” throughout history, with the most famous and most common example served up being that of Albert Einstein. The common narrative is that Einstein, an outcast and a dropout…