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Why are modern scientists so dull?
- michael_dorfman 17y agoWho says modern scientists are dull? Compared to when? Is it really necessary to knock down every straw man one can conceive of?
- smanek 17y agoCompared to Feynman or Erdős or Tesla ;-)
- michael_dorfman 17y agoFeynman and Erdős aren't modern? How about Hawking? I mean,"alive" would have to count for something in the "modern" department, right?
- Alex3917 17y agoIn the context of the article, I would consider modern to mean admitted into grad school later than 1985. It doesn't make sense to talk about people like Hawking because we're talking about the selection effects of school.
- michael_dorfman 17y agoSo, they don't really mean "modern", they mean "young". And they don't really measure a baseline of "dullness" for any preceding generation of young scientists. And of course it doesn't make sense to talk about Hawking, if he is a counter-example.
- jamesbritt 17y agoNit picker. :) I was watching the original version of The Day the Earth Stood Still, and there was one scene that stood out as marking this film as truly from another time. Klaatu is talking to the boy, asking him about who the famous scientists are. And the boy knows! And acts as if everyone in American knows! I gather there are many interesting contemporary scientists, but they simply get no attention in modern culture.
- smanek 17y agoI don't think it's a cultural thing - I just don't think modern scientists are as personally interesting (for the most part). Most people know of, say, Hawking or Perelman because of their personal stories. But even their lives aren't as near as compelling as the greats of the last generation. Not to mention the face that 50 years ago, the work being done was much more significant. I hate to say it, but no truly 'ground breaking' work has really been done in the last half century. There are still a lot of open questions - but we just haven't found the answer. We've just been refining our knowledge of the important work done before that. (Note: I don't mean to say no new work has been done, just nothing major. Name something done in the last 50 years that could compare to the fundamental work done in Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, Genetics, Computation Theory, etc. before that.)
- calambrac 17y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model
- smanek 17y agoFine, you got me - that was 40 years ago, not 50 like I said ;-)
- calambrac 17y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project (for the list of interesting contemporary scientists, I'll nominate Venter. That guy is a trip.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractals All since 1970, is that recent enough? And, ya know, sometimes it does actually take a little time for major achievements to be recognized as such.
- smanek 17y agoWith all due respect to Hawking - I don't think he's anywhere near as interesting as Feynman or Erdos. Feynman traveled to Brazil to learn Bongo drums on whim, he worked in a Strip Club, mastered the art of the pickup, broke into TS safes at the Manhattan Project, was a well known painter under a pseudonym, etc. Erdos was basically homeless, and would show up at mathematician's doors unannounced looking for a roof - and while under their roof, would collaborate on some of the most ground breaking work of the century. He was a heavy drug user, active libertarian, etc. I'm sure Hawking can compete in terms of intellect or work (I have no idea - I'm not capable of judging), but he is nowhere near as interesting.
- Eliezer 17y agoOh, come on! Hawking's supposed to go mountain climbing or something? Guy's got a legitimate excuse.
- smanek 17y agoHawking's story is extraordinary - but you can fill books with entertaining anecdotes Feynman's exploits (in fact, they have). Hawkings probably 'wins' in terms of sheer impressiveness of what he has accomplished and what he has overcome. But I still stand by saying that Feynman was more entertaining.
- Zancarius 17y ago> But I still stand by saying that Feynman was more entertaining. I agree that Feynman is entertaining, and he's something of a legend. I do feel that Hawking is not just fascinating in his own right but he's AMAZINGLY inspirational. Given the adversity he has faced for much of his life, the fact that he still pursues his love of science should be a lesson to all of us. To call his story merely "extraordinary" is doing a grave disservice to such an incredible individual.
- calambrac 17y agoYou didn't say 'entertaining' before, you said 'interesting'.
- antiform 17y agoNo way. There are tons of people in the sciences with very interesting lives, they just don't have people knocking down their door to write popular biographies like Feynman, Erdös, or Tesla. I say that living mathematicians like John Nash Jr., Shing-tung Yau, and Alexander Grothendieck have much more interesting lives than the examples you mentioned.
- Alex3917 17y ago"Who says modern scientists are dull? Compared to when?" Compare non-fiction books of the 70s to non-fiction books today. With the exception of a couple people like Ray Kurzweil, our books today aren't a tenth as creative or brilliant. I'd argue that in most fields today scientists are just refining models created between the 60s and early 80s. Linguistics, educational theory, psychology, and organization behavior are all good examples of this.
- njm 17y agoThis is generally the case across the physical and life sciences too. Even "revolutionary" fields like epigenetics and genomics are effectively refinements and extensions of the pioneering work done in molecular biology during the 1960s and 70s. The same goes for particle physics, where the framework for the standard model is decades old. It seems that scientific innovation occurs in punctuated equilibria.
- Alex3917 17y agoThere's no question things go in S-curves, but I really get the feeling that the kind of people who did great work in the 60s and 70s generally aren't allowed to go into academia today. I personally would probably get a PhD in another life, but there's no point because academia is generally designed to filter people like me out, so I would have to spend 2-4 years convincing the right people to go to bat for me and it's just not worth it.
- dinkumthinkum 17y agoWhat exactly do you mean? I hear a lot of people put this kind of conspiracy theory view of academia out but I never really get the details.
- Alex3917 17y agoWhat I mean is that the best grad schools in the US are purposely designed to have an extreme bias toward selecting students with the best grades and the highest GRE scores. You can still get in without good grades and without taking the GRE if you've done very good research and have earned the trust of the right people, but it's very difficult. And even if you do get accepted, you'd probably face an uphill battle throughout your entire career.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- justin_vanw 17y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thurston http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thurston http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall zkz: Maybe you are boring. (note: The wikipedia articles linked to don't generally tell you why the subject isn't dull. In some cases the stories may need to be heard from people who knew the scientist in question, as there doesn't seem to be any written record to link to.)
- bouncingsoul 17y agoWhy are you insulting zkz? Submitting an article doesn't mean you agree with it.
- justin_vanw 17y agoGood point, I thought this was an Ask HN for some reason.
- bluishgreen 17y agoEven if zkz was agreeing, I don't see justification to insult. Insult doesn't add insight, and generally insulting leads to a drop in the "community" feel of any community which eventually leads to no community.
- jemmons 17y agoMaybe because none of them have mercury poisoning?
- cool-RR 17y agoI haven't finished reading it yet, but I'd say I generally agree that scientists today are dull. They don't have a sense of mission. They have little ambition. They seem more like bureaucrats than scientists. I am trying to separate myself from this trend. (I am currently studying physics independently.) I can recall a few conversations with scientists that re-affirm this observation. One time I phoned a certain doctor of physics at the Hebrew University. (His field is something related to building a quantum computer.) We had a friendly chat about some things in physics, he seemed nice. Then we got to the topic of me studying physics independently, without trying to obtain a degree for it. He asked me, "Why are you studying physics then?" I said, "To discover the laws of the universe." He said, "Seriously now, why?"
- dinkumthinkum 17y agoWhy do you say that scientists to day are dull and don't have a sense of a mission? I really feel, since I never see any real evidence, that these sort of claims are just self-serving. Your example of the physics professor is fine, in that you actually provided an example, but I'm not sure that is a fair evaluation. I think his question is fairly reasonable. The field of physics is so large and the amount of knowledge and sophistication required in both mathematics and physics to actually "discover laws of the universe" that it would be very difficult to achieve such a level by simply independent study. Sure, there people like Srinivasa Ramanujan but they are very, very rare. I think there is too much made about autodidactism. There are many autodidacts. However, how many autodidacts take their learning to such a rigorous degree? Now, compare that with how many people read a few books on physics and are very interested in it but never come close to that level of sophistication. I just don't think we can say "See, academics aren't even interested in learning about the World. They are glorified bureaucrats that can solve differential equations." I think that is a bridge too far.
- cool-RR 17y agoI think his question is fairly reasonable. The field of physics is so large and the amount of knowledge and sophistication required in both mathematics and physics to actually "discover laws of the universe" that it would be very difficult to achieve such a level by simply independent study. I wanted to disagree with your sentence, but now I see it is not grammatically valid. I'll try to guess what you meant and disagree with that. I heard this argument many times. It's basically, "There's too much physics to do physics!" Just because there's a lot of physical knowledge out there, doesn't mean that you have to be a super-genius to do fundamental work. I don't know exactly how to explain this, but I think I can equate it to the internet business, which is probably more familiar to most HN readers. What people say about science can also be said about the internet business. There are so many companies working on internet products, so many start-ups and so much money being poured into this, that surely you have to be a genius with a lot of money and connections to do something that will make a difference! But we know that's not true. And I claim it's not true for science either. -- it would be very difficult to achieve such a level by simply independent study [...] I think there is too much made about autodidactism. I think you're dissing autodidactism too much. What do you think about people teaching themselves to program? Also, just because you're studying independently, doesn't mean you don't consult with other people. I routinely consult with grad students. Also, when you're doing research, you're being autodidactic by definition. -- Sure, there people like Srinivasa Ramanujan but they are very, very rare. [...] how many autodidacts take their learning to such a rigorous degree? How many HN readers actually found a successful start-up, get rich, and live the rest of their lives leisurely working on interesting problems? Probably not too many. But it's not a reason to give up. -- I just don't think we can say "See, academics aren't even interested in learning about the World. They are glorified bureaucrats that can solve differential equations." It's a generalization. There are still many fine scientists. But when trying to compare now to the past, this is what now looks like.
- dinkumthinkum 17y agoI can say I'm not very surprised to see these kinds of sloppy, hand-wavy, unscientific arguments proferred by an evolutionary psychiatrist.
- zxcvb 17y agoYou've clearly never seen Dr Brian Cox the "Rock-star physicist" http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_cox_on_cern_s_supercollider.html http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_cox_on_cern_s_supercollider.h...
- jleyank 17y agoSome of the "problem" might be that things are a bit more entreprenurial than previously. Now, if you've got a wild idea (that just might be right) and you've got the ego to go with it, you can start a company and profit from it. Way more $$ in that than academia. Similarly, there's more $$ in working in industry with a PhD rather than academia. And the tenure/grant game requires those in academia to have political and social skills that might be off-putting to the smart/driven set being talked about. Finally, it's possible we're just not that interested in scientists/engineers (as in the 50's and 60's). Better to know what Lindsay Lohan's up to... There's like an hour of entertainment news EVERY DAY, and maybe a science article or two per quarter. Followup: Rephrasing my Lohan comment - there might be all sorts of interesting scientists out there, but how would any of us know unless they're in the field? Rock stars, nowadays, aren't big-name scientists like they used to be. They're just rock stars...
- ggchappell 17y agoAre they? Sure, compared to the great scientists of the past. But that word "great" is important. As a general rule, when you compare the best things in one category with the average things in another, the first category tends to come out looking better. See also various comparisons in music, literature, etc., etc.