The End of Individual Genius? 364
An anonymous reader writes "A recent study suggests the downfall of individual researchers, who are being rapidly replaced by enormous research groups. Quoting: '... in recent decades — especially since the Soviet success in launching the Sputnik satellite in 1957 — the trend has been to create massive institutions that foster more collaboration and garner big chunks of funding. And it is harder now to achieve scientific greatness. A study of Nobel Prize winners in 2005 found that the accumulation of knowledge over time has forced great minds to toil longer before they can make breakthroughs. The age at which thinkers produce significant innovations increased about six years during the 20th century.'"
Re:The Wisdom of Groups (Score:3, Informative)
Groups tend to be a moderating influence on the individual. So extremes of genius and stupidity are tempered by peer pressure. In small groups it can be presumed (at least) that compatible mindsets of genius can outmatch individual mindsets of genius. Groupthink is only (wholly) bad if the premise of thought is flawed.
For "scientists" groupthink shouldn't even be an issue because "Groupthink is a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas." (Ref. Wikipedia). A group of individual scientists by definition would be the antithesis of Group Think, though irrationality often trumps education and ideals.
Having alternative opinions and personalities is often better than following one bad or mediocre idea. In business however, things are often dictatorial and goals are driven by shareholders whose goals are only abstractly reflected in a balance sheet.
Re:Similar conclusions from bibliometrics (Score:5, Informative)
I can't back that up at all.
In all the papers to which I contributed, the names were in alphabetical order.
A lack of good theory hurts us. (Score:2, Informative)
This is why we need a better "theory of everything". The problem is that all the knowledge that we have accumulated is like so much trivia. There's not nearly enough abstraction where the universe is distilled down to a few essential rules that can easily applied to everything. It's not so much a problem of physics, really, as it is with pure mathematics. Physicists discover what works and how things work, but I think ultimately we want to take seriously and fund seriously mathematics as its own research discipline, so we can get that kind of abstraction that we need.
Nethertheless lone genius still persist (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Similar conclusions from bibliometrics (Score:3, Informative)
I submitted a paper where I worked and my ideas comprise 90% of the story. Author #2 did 8#, author #3 did the last 2%. Author #4 did nothing whatsoever, but for political reasons I had to put her name there. I have seen her 3 times, and she admits she doesn't really understands jack of that paper.
Re:good! (Score:3, Informative)
Since distance = 0.5 * acceleration * time^2, I should hope not.
Re:good! (Score:5, Informative)
It's completely independent of the initial velocity? Send me a postcard from Stockholm.
Re:I believe a wise man once said... (Score:3, Informative)
People just don't understand evolution, that's all.
Attractiveness isn't some magical universal quality. What people find attractive is determined by evolution. We find people attractive in ways that our ancestors found them attractive. People who were wired this way survived and prospered. People who found other things attractive died out.
The only trouble is that these ancient hardwired ideals of attractiveness don't necessarily apply well in the modern world. A lot of it is tied up in health. To a very high degree, somebody who's attractive is also healthy. That pretty face or those curvy boobs held the evidence of fewer childhood diseases, of less likely or less dangerous genetic disabilities, of good nutrition, and of good ability to survive. It makes good sense to mate with somebody like that! However in the modern world it has become very easy to avoid childhood diseases and obtain good nutrition, so attractiveness and fitness have somewhat separated.
Still, even though it may not match up with what's best for us as well as it once did, it surely is far from being purely superficial.
Re:good! (Score:2, Informative)
>Your quote from Newton about standing on the
>shoulders of giants is from a letter to Hooke, who
>was extremely short, whom Newton was trying either
>to flatter for political reasons, or possibly
>subtly insult.
lol. Oh, come on now.
>The second quote is a not-so-subtle put-down of
>Descarte, Leibniz and others whose conjectural
>claims Newton found pointless and stupid, and
>defence of his own approach of saying, "This is
>WHAT happens" rather than "This is WHY it
>happens."
yeah, hypotheses non fingo. I know, I know.
>According to your novel meaning of the word
>Newton also "collaborated" with the guy who
>invented the alphabet, because Newton's work was
>dependent upon that guy's work.
ok don't exaggerate. I was just trying to get the point across that Newton's theories were not just pulled out of thin air, or out of his rear end. He did draw heavily on many of his contempraries' work whether he gave them credit for it or not, e.g., Huygens' pendulum experiments, even on Hooke (though probably grudgingly). His original contribution was what he inferred from all of this, i.e., universal gravity and classical mechanics. Possibly the greatest contribution ever made by any one person. But he could not have done it all by himself.
Also, while he was no saint, I'm sure, I don't know if its fair to characterize him as the Thomas Edison of his day (i.e., as an asshole).
Perhaps 'collaborative' is the wrong word to use, if by collaborative you mean something like actively working together. Admittedly that is probably closer to what we normally mean when we use the word.
But again my point was that Newton built on the work of others, many of whom were his contemporaries. This may seem like an uninteresting thing to say given our current picture of science. But science was rather new back then, and traditional philosophical speculation was often not cumulative in this sense. In fact, this is part of what differentiates science as it was emerging then from what had come before, and part of what has made, and makes science so successful.
Re:Part of the reason for people gathering in (Score:3, Informative)
He did it by studying the results of the experiments of his days : Michelson-Morley, black body radiation, Brownian motion, Photo-electric effect. Today those are well understood.
Frontiers of physics today require access to terabytes of experimental data produced by some of the most expensive and complex machinery build by man.
Re:good! (Score:2, Informative)
ya know what, I take my first reply back. First, drawing on Kepler's astronomical data is not exactly the same as using the alphabet. The former is a tad more relevant. Second, was Newton collaborative in the sense of attending academic conferences, etc.? Probably not, but if he'd had access to today's transportation infrastructure I'm sure he would have been.
Newton's inference to universal gravity was based on Huygen's pendulum experiments (Huygens was not his pupil but a rival scientist), on measurements done in Paris (not done by him personally) of terrestrial gravity (the experimenter's name escapes me now), on astronomical data by Kepler and by Brahe, and also on the astronomical data compiled by his contemporaries.
The Principia is *full* of references to other men, mostly contemporaries. Have you ever read it?
Newton worked closely with Coates as well, whose criticisms of the first edition found their way into the second.
Before they became rivals, Newton corresponded regularly with Leibniz.
Newton was *not* in a bubble.
Re:Similar conclusions from bibliometrics (Score:2, Informative)