I Know More Than Newton, Einstein, and Tesla

I know more than Isaac Newton. 🍎

Not because I'm smarter. Obviously not Newton smart. But because I was born later.

I was catching up with Rahul Agarwal, a colleague from HackerRank, at a coffee place nearby yesterday. ☕ We started talking about how knowledge isn't really a commodity anymore. Anyone can learn anything they want to. Pull up a research paper in seconds. Watch a lecture from MIT on your phone. Ask an AI to break down 40 years of particle physics over lunch. The barriers are practically gone.

And then the conversation took a turn. If anyone can access anything, what even is intelligence? What separates knowing from understanding? 🤔

Newton never knew about relativity. Never heard of quantum mechanics. Never knew about DNA, black holes, or the cosmic microwave background confirming the Big Bang. He spent years on alchemy, trying to turn lead into gold. He couldn't Google a single thing. A 10th grader today learns things in a textbook that would have blown his mind. 🤯

That's not a flex. That's how knowledge works. It's cumulative. Every generation stands on the shoulders of the last one and sees a little further. Newton didn't know about relativity. Einstein didn't know about quantum computing. And someday, a kid in a classroom will casually learn something that would stun every scientist alive today.

He wrote that himself. He was talking about Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus. But it applies all the way down the chain. Einstein stood on Newton. We stand on Einstein. Whoever comes next will stand on all of us, and they'll know things we can't even imagine yet. 🔗

Here's what got me thinking. The raw intelligence hasn't changed. Newton's brain and mine are made of the same stuff. Same neurons, same biology, same hardware that's been roughly identical for 200,000 years. What changed is the accumulated knowledge, the tools, the access. A mass of human understanding that keeps compounding, generation after generation, like the world's longest running open source project. 🧬

My take. Rahul and I kept circling back to the same point over our coffees. Knowledge is everywhere now. It's not locked behind institutions or geography or privilege the way it used to be. My generation knows more than Newton's. The next generation will know more than mine. That's not a threat, that's the whole point. So "I don't know" is a weaker excuse than it's ever been. Not because we're smarter. But because everything we need to learn is already out there, waiting. That's kind of beautiful. ✨

Again. Pens Down 🎤⬇️. In strictly literal sense, I know more than Newton, Einstein, Tesla and all the other greats who came before me. 🤣