Albert Einstein (1879-1955). His case differs from Newton's and Cavendish's in one critical way: the integration layer caught up to the discovery work during Einstein's own lifetime. Einstein did not speak until he was three years old. When he did speak, he repeated sentences to himself — what his family called "pausing to plan" — until he was approximately seven. His sister Maja left a detailed account of his childhood behaviors: the intense restricted interests (magnets, Euclidean geometry, a toy compass whose behavior he found so extraordinary it moved him to trembling), the social difficulties, the fits of rage as a small child, the later preference for solitary work sustained over long periods. Multiple researchers have since assessed Einstein's documented behavior against contemporary diagnostic criteria and concluded that the profile maps recognizably onto the autism spectrum, though Einstein himself, of course, never had a clinical label attached to him. The label did not yet exist in the form we now use.
What Einstein had instead was a cognitive mode he could describe in his own words. He described himself, in letters and in his autobiographical writings, as a person who thought in images rather than in words. He described the Gedankenexperiment — the thought experiment — as his primary method of physical investigation. He would imagine a scenario: a man falling freely from a rooftop, a person riding a beam of light, a train traveling at near the speed of light. He would hold the scenario in his head with high internal fidelity, running the physics of the scenario forward until the consequences became visible. The relativity papers of 1905 emerged from this method. Einstein could not have arrived at special relativity through verbal reasoning alone. The work required a cognitive architecture that could visualize the physical scenario at sufficient resolution to extract the mathematical structure from the visualization itself.
But the engine produced the papers while Einstein was working as a patent examiner, third class, in Bern. He had no academic appointment. He had no laboratory. He had no students. He had no senior sponsor in the physics community. He had a degree from the Swiss Federal Polytechnic but had failed to secure the academic positions he applied for after graduation, because his classroom behavior had alienated the professors who would have had to recommend him. His social mode was the discovery mode. The integration mode — building the professional relationships that would have secured him a university position — was something he did badly enough that the system rejected him before he had a chance to do any work. He published the four 1905 papers from his patent office desk, on his own time, using his own mathematical training, with his wife Mileva assisting with some of the calculations. He was twenty-six years old.
And this is where the integration layer arrived. Max Planck, the physicist who had developed quantum theory five years earlier, was among the reviewers when Einstein's papers arrived at Annalen der Physik. Planck read the special relativity paper and immediately recognized what it was. He did not wait to build consensus. He did not hedge. He endorsed publication, and then he wrote to Einstein personally, and then — and this is the crucial step — he began advocating for Einstein inside the German academic physics community. Planck was one of the most senior and respected physicists in the world. His endorsement of a patent clerk's papers carried weight that Einstein's own name did not yet carry. Within two years, Einstein had his first academic appointment. Within five years, he was a professor. Within ten years, he was one of the most famous physicists in the world. Without Planck, the 1905 papers would still have been published in Annalen der Physik, because the papers were clearly correct. But without Planck, the papers would have taken twenty years or more to be fully absorbed into the physics community, and Einstein would have remained at the patent office for most of that time. The general theory of relativity — Einstein's even more important 1915 work — was possible only because Einstein had, by 1915, the academic position and the collaborators that Planck's early advocacy had made available to him.