Split Second (Split Second, #1)

by Douglas E. Richards

“If you copied a hundred Einsteins, only one would have come up with relativity. Why? Because the others would be in different environments. Any Einstein in a university environment would have worked on other problems, and would have been restricted in his thinking by the status quo, would have been discouraged from ideas that seemed insane. “Only Einstein the patent clerk would have come up with relativity. First, he was free of academic shackles. Second, it just so happened that he worked on patents having to do with the transmission of electric signals and electrical-mechanical synchronization of time. Both of these are key ingredients in the thought experiments that led him to his radical conclusions.”