Not the dramatic, public kind. Hers was a quiet, tenured failure at a middling university. Her colleagues published; she perished slowly. Her problem wasn't a lack of intelligence, but a lack of nerve . Every research path seemed to lead to a mathematical swamp she couldn't cross. So, she taught. And she graded. And she grew old.
"Derive the fine structure constant from the angle of a raindrop on a windowpane. Hint: The window is your own skull." problems in quantum mechanics with solutions squires pdf
She spent the next six months not writing a paper, but living the solution. She stopped grading every assignment with obsessive care (decoherence). She started a messy, speculative blog (superposition). She asked a ridiculous, childish question at a seminar: "What if the fine structure constant is just the ratio of courage to fear?" Not the dramatic, public kind