It's a great angle on the communication side of science. I think the notion of "great man" like the genius of "Einstein" or "Newton" is seriously skewed. If yo

It's a great angle on the communication side of science. I think the notion of "great man" like the genius of "Einstein" or "Newton" is seriously skewed. If you take a closer look at their correspondence and upbringing, they both were very well "connected" in their own ways beforehand. This picture of a loner sitting bored at a Patent Office and all by himself coming up with 4 groundbreaking papers (photoelectric effect, brownian motion, special relativity) in 1905 - [or Newtons "annus mirabilis" after fleeing Cambridge University because of the plague in 1665 and "quarantining" himself for 2 years in his native village (by his own account (!) there he singlehandendly developed integral calculus, dicovered the composite nature of light and finally refined his gravitational theory)] - readily highlights the individual instances of "genius" which I do not want to dismiss here - but entirely blanks out how those free floating ideas were able to circulate and bounce off each other giving rise to those great insights in the "quiet" moments of those "geniuses". Only after their recognition of "genius" they seemed to develop some really unhealthy stubbornness. Newton - beginning in 1686 with his publication of the Principia - "disputing" any influence Hooke might have had and at his height of power letting his "Royal Society" create a comittee to decide against Leibniz "priority" regarding "calculus" in 1712). Einstein beginning with the Bohr debate (1927 onwards) and productively contributing to the EPR paradox in 1934 (further developed by Bell to the infamous "Bell's theorem") felt more and more "misunderstood" and isolated himself to work on his own "unified field theory" and from then on did not participate in any of the "quantum mechanics" of his time.