I don't think it's impossible to get another Einstein in today's scientific environment, but it is difficult.
It's a tricky balance to get right. On the one hand, there is definitely too much pressure to publish. This results in relatively minor results being put on the same peer-reviewed pedestal as breakthrough discoveries, and a huge amount of time can be spend quibbling over minutia. The grant-based system of funding is even more dangerous since it reduces the amount of time doing useful science as much as possible. Postdoctoral fellowships (where you can do more or less whatever you want without worrying about funding) are not extinct, but they are far too rare. They should be the norm, not the exception.
On the other hand, science has become more complicated. We have access to a wealth of observational and theoretical data that we just didn't have access to before. So perhaps this rather more incremental approach is inevitable - there are many cases where the data leads naturally to contradictory conclusions. Resolving the paradoxes is not easy.
It's not a simple situation of either "academia is bad" or "academia is awful". It's more complicated than that.
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2015/11/when-worlds-collide-science-in-society.html
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/12/einstein-gravitational-waves-physics
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Every field has become incredibly complicated, gone are the days where someone could create groundbreaking tech in their shed. I think the only one where the latest work is accessible to anyone is computer science.
ReplyDeleteAnd let's not forget Einstein himself spend decades trying to come up with a Theory of Everything, and failed.
ReplyDeleteSomehow I don't see Einstein as a proponent of baby steps.
ReplyDeleteDavid Carlson Well, he damn well should have been. His research relied on decades of previous advances in mathematics and physics. Like others before him, it was he who made the key breakthrough but this would not have been possible without legions of others who have mostly faded into history.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor from what you wrote, I get the impression that young scientists cannot get grants to do pure research. Is that true?
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor I could be wrong for a lot of reasons, but I don't think "shoulders of giants" is a fair criticism, since in each case, Einstein contributed a key insight which represented a quantum leap forward.
ReplyDeleteDavid Westebbe Well, it's not impossible, just difficult. Grants are highly competitive. Applying for one takes a full 1-2 months of work with typically a 1 in 4 chance of success, sometimes as low as 1 in 10 (and if you really need a grant you might apply for several per year). I'm not at all keen on the grant system because it takes so much time away from doing science to even get one and if you do you've (to some extent) tied your own hands as to what research you can actually do.
ReplyDeleteIt isn't quite as bad as it may sound since usually institutes do have some money to hire postdocs to work as they see fit, but most postdocs these days are hired on an existing grant to work on specific topics.
David Carlson I'm not saying Einstein wasn't a genius in his own right, but he was most certainly standing on the shoulders of giants. Without Maxwell, Lorentz, Riemann, Poincare and many others, Einstein would have been a footnote in history. Almost all of the mathematics needed for relativity was already in place before he came along.
ReplyDeleteEinstein's breakthrough was to realise that all of this highly abstract mathematics could be applied to the real world in a way that no-one had any previous inkling of doing. That is not trivial - the maths involved is damned hard. To go from these pure mathematical conjectures and realise spacetime itself is a thing took a truly remarkable vision. Understanding the meaning of the raw equations required true genius - but there's not a snowball's chance in hell it would have happened without that previous pure research.
Rhys Taylor Of course everything you point out about his predecessors is right, as you know far better than I, but it's something of an oblique straw man argument which doesn't address my suggestion that he offered key insights which were clearly not baby steps and would likely have been prejudiced against science by nuance.
ReplyDeleteDavid Carlson Einstein couldn't have made his key breakthroughs without his predecessors' baby steps. So if he wasn't a proponent of baby steps, he should have been. I'm not disputing that he made key breakthroughs, but that doesn't detract from the necessity of the preceding incremental research.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor I'll give it a rest and say that I don't like science by nuance that merely offers fine tuning or ad hoc secondary mechanisms when favored theories are falsified by new evidence.
ReplyDeleteDavid Carlson Ah, I see. I think we are talking at cross-purposes. "Baby steps" to me means a small, incremental advance in theory, but an advance nonetheless. You appear to be talking about making minor adjustments that don't actually add anything new. I don't have a term for that, but I wouldn't call them baby steps.
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