Joseph Henrich

As a patent clerk, he was actually processing devices to synchronize trains in different parts of Europe.

And so he had to think about the amount of time a signal coming from different parts of the world.

And there was a bunch of these.

And we know the patents that went through.

And we know that he had to look at these.

There was only two guys.

So he happened to be in a particular place and time in terms of the ideas circulating and what he was doing on a day-to-day basis that really did give him an edge.

Now, you could then say, well, what about general relativity?

Well, there was a couple other guys who were probably going to get general relativity.

And Einstein himself was worried that he was going to get scooped.

Because once you get the one, it's just a matter of figuring – I mean it's just a matter of figuring out the math.

The math is really hard.

But there were a number of other people who probably would have gotten the math.

Well, I guess with the point – I mean obviously he's a special individual.

Although there's a – he did spend the whole second half of his career trying to show why quantum mechanics was wrong.

Yeah.

So his Brownian motion paper is foundational in quantum mechanics.

Yeah.

But then he decides, you know, God doesn't play dice with the universe, and he doesn't like the stochastic nature of quantum mechanics, which has, you know, more or less proved true, and it's part of our modern technology and stuff like that.

And he spends the whole second half of his career fighting it.