Interesting. I always had a hard time squaring Dave Patterson's "grad students are the coin of the realm" comment with my friends' experiences in other discipli

Interesting. I always had a hard time squaring Dave Patterson's "grad students are the coin of the realm" comment with my friends' experiences in other disciplines, which were a lot more along the lines of what went on with this Carreira jerk. My impression regarding this divide is that major discoveries in math, physics, CS etc. tend to be the result of very original, creative thinking--ah-ha! moments--and that is not the sort of thing that can be stimulated by simply doubling the amount of time you spend working. Whereas big papers in chem and bio appear to result, in large part, from a tremendous amount of trial-and-error gruntwork spent on the bench. Certainly, somebody's inspiration (the PI's) is driving the overall research program, but you need a huge amount of manual labor to bring it to fruition. Whereas, in the theory fields, you can just sort of stare off into space until it comes to you. My experience is definitely on the theory side, so I would love to hear what the other sides's thoughts are...