Bear with me and wait til the end. There is a point.

I'm autistic, and of the scary smart variety. In my life, I've only met a handful of people who are smarter than I am. Not a brag, just a fact. After all, someone has to be on the far edge of the bell curve.

I know that I could have done incredible things if my life had gone differently. I spend most of my free time thinking about quantum physics and cosmology and the nature of reality. These things make sense to me on a very deep level. I don't think I'd produce a breakthrough on the scale of relativity, but I know I have something to contribute.

I say could have because life has not been kind to me. I grew up poor in a poor small town. School was hard, to put it lightly. The US education system is/was a one size fits all thing, and you suffer the consequences if you don't fit. I was there to learn, but I couldn't get material fast enough. If I tried to get ahead, I was beaten back down. No one ever tried to actually help or understand me. No one, not even my parents.

I couldn't get through college for similar reasons. I tried three times but I could never get any value out of it, it was just a waste of my time.

Because I grew up poor and I don't have a degree, I did not have many opportunities. Until very recently, my life has simply been grinding away at whatever meaningless job kept me from starving.

Being beaten down by the system over and over, and being a wage slave does not leave much time or motivation for independent study. The notion of even having enough free time to work out something like relativity has been an absurd fantasy my whole life.

All in all, life has been lonely and traumatizing. The isolation of not having an intellectual peer is really profound, and it's taboo to even talk about. The moment you say you're smarter than the average bear, people come crawling out of the woodwork to tell you how wrong you are. I've heard many anecdotes from people like me who have hidden their true talent their entire life. I wanted so desperately to fit in, to find a peer group, to not be so utterly alone. I hid my talents even from myself. I built walls so high that even decades later I still don't know what I'm really capable of. I've never explored the full extent of my abilities.

I'm no Einstein, but if someone like me has been so thoroughly stymied by life and society, I have no trouble imagining an Einstein or a Hawking being crushed into the dirt.

Sometimes I get really sad thinking about what could have been and where it all went wrong. I grieve for the person I could have been. I wasted decades of my life and have nothing but scars and burnt bridges to show for it. I try not to go down that particular mental path too often.

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The other side of this coin is the nature of scientific development these days. We've pushed knowledge so much farther than most people realize. It now takes teams of people and ludicrous amounts of resources to pursue a breakthrough. Probably most of our modern day geniuses are quietly toiling away on developments that the public won't ever realize or appreciate.

We're on an exponential curve of scientific and technologic advancement. We're making all kinds of breakthroughs all the time. But there probably isn't a breakthrough to be made on the reality shattering scale of general relativity. At least not one that a single person can come up with in their spare time.

There's lots of reasons we don't have a modern Einstein. Geniuses absolutely do still exist, but they're either denied the opportunity to contribute or their contributions are just one of many in their field. Within the scientific community, many of these people are known and appropriately appreciated, but there's nothing sensational enough to capture the attention of the media and the public.

I'd say it's mostly social reasons, but also we've pushed the boundary of knowledge so far that it's just harder to punch through than it was a century ago. I guarantee geniuses at or beyond the level of Einstein are still being born today, but no one cares to recognize them the same way.