[bawolff]

Also, its not like Einstein was rejecting the data, as far as i understand he just felt the theory was unsatisfying and was hoping to come up with a better one.

Something physicists are still trying to do to this day. Science is never done. There is no "final" theory.

[somenameforme]

I probably should have placed my other comment [1] as a response to yours in order to continue our discussion, as it won't appear when you view 'threads' on the HN UI. You can't really reject data (though you can reject how it is measured), but you can reject attempts to explain data - and that is precisely what he did, til his death, with quantum mechanics. That comment is a full-context letter from Einstein, in his own words, on this topic. His comments against it were harsh and highly prejudiced. He was, and remained, completely convinced of his own rightness, even though he had absolutely no justification for it, and every bit of evidence that existed seemed to falsify such a perspective.

And I'm not using this to argue that Einstein was somehow flawed. Rather I'm using it to argue that he was a human, and we all behave the same way. Putting scientists, or even science, on a pedestal is turning it into a cargo cult. Einstein's success was not driven by any systematically replicable method or anything of the sort. Rather he was an extremely intelligent human who happened to have biases for ideas that turned out to be completely correct in one dimension, and [probably] completely wrong in another.

This is also why increasing the number of physicists by 100x won't increase the rate of advances in physics by 100x, or even remotely close. There's even an argument it could viably reduce it by some sort of Malthusian crowding effect. Everybody scrapping for limited publication and attention pushes science more and more towards high brow click bait and vast sums of plausible sounding noise (which is easier than ever in modern times due to LLMs) can make it difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640321