Not at Face Value

So, I'm watching this show on Einstein. Prior to becoming a big name, he was a major slacker, came from a middling background and was not a "known" academic superstar. I mean, he was a 3rd class patent clerk. Yet, somehow, he managed to come up with the special theory of relativity, basically as a nobody. He was able to come up with a theory that fairly completely contravened traditional Newtonian physics that was the predominant school of thought of the day. You gotta figure that, when Max Planck read Einstein's first papers, particularly had he known the "nobody" background of the author, he'd have had to have thought something like, "fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!"