First, I invented the simplest explanation of the speed of light.
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Second, I calculated the value of this invention using the following logic:
“If explaining the speed of light to 1 million students saves $1 per student, the added value would be $1 million. Scaling this to 1 billion students results in $1 billion of added value.”
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My evaluation method is inspired by Steve Jobs’ approach:
One day Jobs came into the cubicle of Larry Kenyon, an engineer who was working on the Macintosh operating system, and complained that it was taking too long to boot up. Kenyon started to explain, but Jobs cut him off. “If it could save a person’s life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?” he asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year that people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year. “Larry was suitably impressed, and a few weeks later he came back and it booted up twenty-eight seconds faster,” Atkinson recalled. “Steve had a way of motivating by looking at the bigger picture.” – “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson
Third, I estimated the value added by Einstein at $1 quadrillion.
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Finally, I assume that if the Einstein Prize Project stimulates society to focus more on groundbreaking science, leading to even one super-scientific discovery, the project’s value would be equivalent to that discovery. Typically, super-scientists make multiple discoveries, so $1 quadrillion represents the cumulative value of all discoveries made by such a scientist.
Alec Pan 