25. Super Genius Does More in a Year than Most Ordinary Geniuses Do in a Lifetime
In January and February of 1905, Albert Einstein came up with the theory of relativity, demonstrating that Isaac Newton was wrong about space and time being absolute. In March, he again revolutionized science with his work on quantum theory. Then in April and May, he published a pair of papers that proved the assumed but hitherto unverified existence of the atom. Einstein did all of that by the time he was 26.
For the remainder of his life – he lived another half-century, before dying in 1955 – none of Einstein’s scientific contributions matched those of 1905. Which is not to say that he coasted for the rest of his life on the accomplishments of his youth. However, if he had done that, it would have been OK: his accomplishments in that single year exceeded the contributions of the entire lifetimes of multiple geniuses.