The earth was stationary and the sun traveled around it. This was an established fact, and everyone knew it.
But Copernicus had the audacity to ask himself, “What if everyone is wrong?” Copernicus died of natural causes in May 1543, shortly after his revolutionary book was published.
Galileo was arrested, convicted, and punished by the Inquisition in 1633 for proving that Copernicus was right: “The sun does not revolve around the earth; the Earth revolves around the Sun.”
Giordano Bruno faced even harsher punishment than Galileo from the same Inquisition. Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy after proposing that the stars were distant suns surrounded by their own planets, and that the universe was infinite.
Two thousand years before those three astronomers decided that everyone was wrong, Socrates asked himself, “What if everyone is wrong?”
He was sentenced to death for his teachings, but his “Socratic method” of using cross-examination to uncover truth evolved into our modern Scientific Method as well as our Modern Legal System of adversarial cross-examination in courtrooms.
“But the irrational persecution of innovators doesn’t happen anymore, right?”
After writing Common Sense, that legendary pamphlet that sparked the American Revolution and created this ongoing American Experiment, Thomas Paine wrote The Age of Reason, which criticized institutionalized religion. He was outlawed in Britain, narrowly escaped the guillotine in revolutionary France, and was completely ostracized in America. Thomas Paine died in poverty on June 8, 1809, in New York City’s Greenwich Village.
In 1847, Ignaz Semmelweis asked himself “What if everyone is wrong?” Then he required every doctor in his Obstetrics ward at Vienna General Hospital to disinfect their hands before delivering a baby.
The death rate among young mothers in his Obstetrics ward fell from 18% to less than 2%.
These results proved that Semmelweis was correct in his theory about the transfer of disease, but the other doctors were so offended that they persecuted him into a nervous breakdown, then they had him committed to an insane asylum where he was beaten to death by the guards.
The death rate of young mothers who gave birth at Vienna General Hospital returned to 18 percent.
In 1903, George Bernard Shaw wrote, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.”
There are few thoughts as audacious or as powerful as when a person says to themselves, “What if everyone is wrong?”
I will tell you one last story.
My genius friend Matthew recently moved into a house in the middle of the woods in a faraway place.
Prior to moving away, he lived in Austin where he worked remotely for an old and famous technologist who looked long and hard at data centers and said to himself, “What if everyone is wrong?”
This old technologist recruited theoretical physicists, rare materials scientists, and a whole wonderland of other endangered species, one of which was my friend Matthew. He said to them, “The world does not need more data centers. It needs a whole new way of computing that uses one one-thousandth as much electricity.”
His team is not creating software or processors or any of the other things you associate with computers. They are inventing a whole new way of computing that will use less than one one-thousandth as much energy as today’s computers.
Sit with that for a minute.
Two weeks before he packed his stuff, sold his house, and drove away into the sunset, Matthew told us that the team recuited by the old technologist had achieved proof-of-concept. And then he showed us the proof and told us not to speak of it for at least a month.
He then described to us a few of the countless obstacles that would hinder the announcement, acceptance, adoption, and widespread distribution of this new method of computing.
Matthew continues to work for the old technologist whose team of endangered species is bringing his vision closer and closer to scalability. Matthew says that he is having more fun than he has ever had in his life.
I wish him the best. Don’t you?
Roy H. Williams
For most of us, visiting an accountant sounds about as appealing as a trip to the dentist. But accountant Ron Wood is no buttoned-up Big Four stereotype. His clients include a cannabis farm in Oregon and paintball enthusiasts splattered across the country.
With year-end approaching, Ron makes a lively case to roving reporter Rotbart for acting now, while there’s still time to legally shrink your 2026 tax bill and clean up ledgers that could cause expensive IRS headaches later.
Ron also explains why smart business owners see their accountants at least twice as often as their dentists. A lively, fun-loving, and valuable conversation is happening right now at MondayMorningRadio.com