The Einstein Trap: Are you building Physics or Chemistry?
Are you falling into the Einstein Trap? Most founders burn cash building "Physics." Unlock the "Chemistry" framework to build the first one-person AI unicorn.
I studied physics at Boğaziçi University, right on the edge of the Bosphorus, where Europe and Asia meet. It is the perfect place to watch two continents smash into each other, blend, and create something entirely new.
I’ll come back to that collision-and-fusion analogy in a moment.
I spent years staring at equations that described the fundamental laws of the universe. It was brutal, beautiful, and humbling.
But the biggest lesson I learned didn’t come from a textbook. It came from realizing a strange truth about scientific history:
“The equations are often smarter than the people who wrote them”
Take Einstein.
He wrote the equations for General Relativity, but he essentially said, “This is too complicated to solve”. It wasn’t Einstein who figured out that his math predicted black holes; it was a totally different guy, Karl Schwarzschild.
In 1915, Schwarzschild picked up Einstein’s work and discovered the first complete solution. He found the “Schwarzschild solution”—the Black Hole.
This reveals the blind spot in our hero worship. Einstein provided the Physics (the intuition and laws), but he needed a different kind of specialist to provide the Chemistry (the specific solution).
Most of you are suffering from “Einstein Envy”. And it’s killing your startup.
Sam Altman predicts that we will soon see the first “one-person billion-dollar company”. I believe him. But most founders are misinterpreting how that will happen.
They think that to be that one person, they need to be a lone genius inventing a new theory of gravity from scratch.
Stop it. You are burning cash and time. To be that one-person unicorn, you need to stop trying to be the physicist and start being the chemist.
The “Physics vs. Chemistry” Framework
If you look at how the universe is structured, it’s built in layers. At the bottom, you have Quantum Field Theory (Physics). On top of that, you stack Atoms. On top of that, Chemistry. Then Biology.
If you tried to explain a human brain using only quantum mechanics equations, you’d lose your mind. It’s too complex. You need to operate at the right layer.
In the AI era, we are seeing the exact same stratification:
