Once Jeff Bezos achieves great riches, his opportunities for further enrichment multiply; the more a scientific paper is cited, the better known it is and the more likely it is to attract further citations. Anytime you have outliers whose success multiplies success, you switch from the domain of the normal distribution to the land ruled by the power law—from a world in which things vary slightly to one of extreme contrasts. And once you cross that perilous frontier, you better begin to think differently.
