I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.
—Albert Einstein

Our progress leading into the twentieth century was extraordinary... or so we thought. Leading up to 1905, when Einstein published his earth-shattering paper on relativity, a few scientists were beginning to notice - almost subconciously - that all was not as well established as it seemed. In 1894, Albert Michelson spoke with great confidence:

the more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.

As if to foreshadow the coming tide, the over-confident scientific community really didn't know what hit them when Einstein suddenly became a household name when his theories turned Newton's laws upside down on the front of the November 7, 1919 London Times (83 years ago tomorrow). His ideas were so crazy that he didn't win a Nobel Prize because the committee was still grappling with the possiblity that Einstein could really be right.

We certainly pronounce (and rightfully so) Albert Einstein as the figurehead behind these ideas that drive today's astrophysics labs. But those few scientists that noticed the mounting problems were actually finding out the same stuff Albert figured out: he was not alone in his ideas, even if others were making the same discoveries oceans away from each other. Here's an excerpt from an essay by Charles Liu, a scientist at the American Museum of Natural History:

It seems that the progress of scientific theory, like scientific experiments, much also reach a critical mass of development before a real breakthrough occurs. Paradigms in science shift, not by wildly disparate thoughts coming together from nowhere, but rather under the increasing weight of mounting theoretical and experimental study, before one person with one idea can push on the precariously balanced monolith and bring it tumbling down.

What are your ideas and what makes you passionate about them? What is your "tipping point" to cause a ripple, start a commotion, crumble a foundation, or launch a thousand ships?

Read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.

Get swept away into the jaw-dropping world of relativity.