Walter Isaacson

He says, well, if you catch up with it, if you go almost as fast, it'll look stationary.

But Maxwell's equations don't allow for that.

And he said, it was making my palms sweat that I was so worried.

And so he finally figures out, because he's looking at these devices, the synchronized clocks, that if you're traveling really, really fast, what looks synchronous to you or synchronized to you is different than for somebody traveling really fast in the other direction.

And he makes a mental leap.

That time...

That the speed of light is always constant, but time is relative depending on your state of motion.

So it was that type of out-of-the-box thinking, those leaps that made 1905 his miracle year.

Likewise with Musk.

I mean, after General Motors and Ford, everybody gives up on electric vehicles.

To just say, I know how we're going to have a path to change the entire trajectory of the world into the era of electric vehicles.

And then when he comes back from Russia where he tried to buy a little rocket ship so he could send a experimental greenhouse to Mars and they were...

poking fun of him and actually spit on him at one point in a drunken lunch.

This is very fortuitous because on the ride back home, on the Delta Airlines flight, he's like doing the calculations of how much materials, how much metal, how much fuel.

How much would it really cost?

And so he's visualizing things that other people would just say is impossible.

It's what Steve Jobs' friends called the reality distortion field, and it drove people crazy.

It drove them mad, but it also drove them to do things they didn't think they would be able to do.

I think they were all visual thinkers, perhaps coming from slight handicaps as children, meaning...

You know, Leonardo was left-handed and a little bit dyslexic, I think.