find it amusing how strong the conformist herd mentality is among many physicists, given that we all pay lip service to thinking outside the box and challenging authority. I’d become acutely aware of this sociological situation already back in grad school: for example, Einstein’s revolutionary relativity theory never won the Nobel Prize,1 Einstein himself dismissed Friedmann’s expanding-universe discovery, and Hugh Everett never even got a job in physics. In other words, much more important discoveries than I could realistically hope to make were being dismissed.
