[juanbyrge]

I think they may be underestimating the interactions that scientists have with other perhaps lesser folks in their field.

For example, Einstein may not have been able to publish the special theory of relativity without the work produced by lesser known scientists such Lorentz, Michaelson, Morley, Maxwell, Grossman. And transitively all of those scientists were undoubtedly influenced by others who may be even lesser known or influential.

[analog31]

In my view it's a mistake to assume that we only need the elite, and that we only need breakthroughs.

I'm certainly one of the lesser folks. Much lesser. Even while in grad school, I knew that the arc of my career was not going to bend towards tenure. I wrote up what is somewhat disparagingly referred to in my field as an "equipment thesis" and went to industry. But today, I develop scientific equipment, so my equipment thesis wasn't so far off base. ;-)

But front-line science research can't be done without equipment that is developed by engineering teams that include some scientists. Likewise for a lot of important but less glamorous things such as figuring out if your water is safe to drink, or if you have COVID-19. And if those teams are going to include some scientists, then you also need people who get a science education and go into teaching.

And in a better world, you might even have a few science educated people who work at various levels of government.

[fuzzfactor]

What do you mean by "equipment thesis"?

Scientific apparatus can be a major obstacle or it can give more leverage than cash.

At 70 messages almost all the problems in this thread I felt as a child, then began to understand as a student.

Great breakthroughs had always been accomplished by the elite in some way or another, but without royal patronage or something like that you were going to be very unlikely to build the kind of laboratory you need to do any new experimentation & discovery you may have in mind.

If you're going to create your best technology you're going to need a place to build and audition your contenders.

Plus 90 percent or more of that effort is always wasted so you have to get busy, start early and never stop.

So that's what I did.

With limited privileges for resources the only way to come close to productivity is to continuously improve the ability to extract far more performance from the same assets compared to accepted operators. That's not easy and you don't get far the first few years.

If you wait until you've got the resources of a gentleman scientist before you get underway you may be waiting a while. I don't think that success model comes back in style every generation anyway or we'd have more of that legendary type of success.

Remember in the not-too-distant past, computers had been essential for years but no individual had yet owned one personally.

Almost all technology beyond pure math could not be well pursued without a specialized facility.

You saved up your other creative abilities until you had access to what it took to carry them out, then made the most of it while you were equipped.

Today it's thought if you are going to make the most of a gifted researcher's time they are going to need to hit the ground running in a facility that is established and has momentum. There will be some kind of expectation to contribute to the momentum of the facility, and there will need to be an open slot. The only things like that are called institutions for a reason, because they're staying right where they are.

I'm still not so sure if I'm ready for an institution.

It might be worthwhile to ask the bench workers what kind of facility they would be able to invent more things in, then go ahead and let them take the time to build it while the PhD's are still going at their full rate in their preferred way.

I say it's possible for the bench workers to come from behind and get some wins.

Focus on getting the most out of the equipment while the PhDs are busy at their desks and conferences, then spin the collateral progress out into companies faster than the PhDs have normally been on the path to have that happen.

Plus the PhDs have to be satisfied once their papers are well-cited and have reached their hard-won goal of clawing their way to the rare top position against all odds, so they should be entitled to relax a bit more each decade as this process itself has become more challenging, and not do any lowly bench work.

It might just take a gentleman's agreement to get promising scientists to aspire to a hierarchy-free class of operation you don't always get every generation.

Statistics tell me there is at least one person without a PhD who would proceed directly to a 100 percent effective Covid vaccine or treatment single handedly in only a few months using no more than 1 percent of the resources relative to proven successes like Pfizer or Moderna.

Basically having much better aptitude than almost all humans, lacking mainly only equipment and support of an effort. Statistics also say this person will remain unheard of and there is almost no chance there will be any widespread benefit from this persons life's work, no matter if even more unlikely challenges of any kind are more thoroughly overcome.

It's just too tall an order and for best results it might take someone who could carefully select the right 1 percent to work with from all the resources both of these companies have that might be helpful, plus lots of other companies and institutions.

But the person who might be found in that well-resourced kind of position never seems to be able to be the right kind of person.

I predict that scientists will one day discover your theory of government can be leveraged for more widespread benefit to humanity than probably all of your professors' accomplishments combined, if they were the kind not fully respecting your focused effort.

EDIT: added hierarchy-free

[konjin]

Not to mention that the majority of 'big' ideas are published simultaneously by multiple people at different locations.

Big name scientists are usually the ones happy with publishing a half baked idea instead of being universally original.

One need to look at Turing and Post, or Darwin and Wallace for a comparison.

I blame papers being referenced by author name for this mental bias in the sciences.

[raister]

> ... lesser known scientists such as ..., Maxwell, ...

Maxwell was already a GIANT in Einstein times.

[juanbyrge]

Fair point, Maxwell was one of the most brilliant scientists ever. Definitely on par with Einstein, Newton, and Galileo. It's a shame he died so young, who knows what else he could have discovered during his lifetime.

I suppose if you ask a random sample, however, many people will have heard of Einstein but not Maxwell.

[albertgoeswoof]

It’s scientists all the way down