“To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself”
-Albert Einstein
By rejecting the status quo and revolutionizing physics with his rebellious notions of space and time, Einstein eventually became the scientific establishment – the authority that younger physicists rebelled against through a “quantum” leap of thought and imagination.
But it was upon the former rebel’s shoulders that these young turks stood in their rebellion – just as it was for Einstein himself two decades before.
And so it is that human history progresses: through a cycle of rebellion and revolution, of one sort or another, against established authority, thus becoming the new authority from which, one day, new revolution foments.