Are you saying he was secretly a professional physicist? His alter-ego was Relativity Man, and along with Niels Bohr (Atomic Model Man), Max Planck (Quanta Man), and a host of others, he met in the Halls of Physics to save the world from the photoelectric paradox, non-atomic theory, and other science evil-doers? My comic book on Einstein said he didn't join the Physics League until late 1905.

Seriously though, he was less than five years out of school and working at the Patent Office when he published his first orthodoxy-shattering theory. He wasn't a layman like you and I are, but he was hardly a member of the physics establishment.

(My apologies if you're less than five years out of school and and this touched a sensitive nerve.)

Yeah, if the history of physics has shown us anything, it's that laymen have never had any special insight into areas that professional physicists do not. They should stick to their own line of work, like clerking at the Patent Office. Sheesh.

While this guy didn't have anything new to add, people who've been studying something for their entire lives tend to not be the ones that successfully overturn the orthodoxy. Einstein himself fell into the orthodoxy, and published very little of significant value after 1916--unless you count the EPR thought experiment, which advanced physics greatly, but only by being proven wrong.

If your "Plastic" skin is damaged, wouldn't it be easier to just switch to a different skin, like "Sky Blue" or "Metal"?