Hawking Searching For Africa's Einsteins

nuke-alwin writes "Stephen Hawking has traveled to South Africa in search of Africa's Einsteins. The project will create Africa's first post-graduate center for math and physics. The British government has unfortunately decided not to back the project, which is hoping to fight poverty by identifying the kind of talent that can create wealth." Neil Turok is deeply involved as well; he was recently named to head the Perimeter Institute in Canada, whose server we brought to its knees this morning.

Comments

Brain drain, ver 0.1

[CogDissident]

So, if these math geniuses get a degree there, whats to keep them from just moving out of country? Nothing? Honestly, if I were born in an absolutely impoverished country, and ended up being a genius and getting a graduate degree in mathematics, I'm sure I'd hop on the first chance at a big corporate job in some other country.

Re:Brain drain, ver 0.1

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they're not tools. I know many Indian (real India) and Chinese nationals who plan to move back to their "impoverished" countries to work and play.

Re:Brain drain, ver 0.1

[yodleboy]

that may be true, but i've notice that a lot of smart, wealthy successful people eventually "go home" in some sense, not always physically, of course. They may donate to local causes, invest, become involved in politics or advocacy. whatever they do, they probably would not have been able without opportunities like this.

Re:Brain drain, ver 0.1

[CRCulver]

A lot of people who get big corporate jobs in wealthy countries send money back to where they came from, benefitting the local economy. Go to Moroccan villages and you can see loads of fancy houses being built by people currently working in France who plan on coming home and retiring early. Software engineers from India who have come to the U.S. after training in India have gone home after a few years and founded companies with the money they saved. Cities in Romania like Cluj enjoy higher standards of living than other parts of the country because, thanks to the good education and English-language skills, people work hard abroad and then come back to indulge themselves. The list goes on and on. If you train people in a poor country, many will go and never return. However, some will make something of themselves abroad with their education and come back, which is a win for the local economy.

Re:Brain drain, ver 0.1

[edisrafeht]

Whether they go back home or not is not as important as providing the opportunity for these gifted individuals. They may still contribute something to the world, regardless of their location.

Re:Brain drain, ver 0.1

[WaltBusterkeys]

i've notice[d] that a lot of smart, wealthy successful people And how many of those wealthy successful people were mathematicians and physicists? Smart, certainly. But wealthy?

Re:Brain drain, ver 0.1

[CogDissident]

Not as much of a win as keeping them in-country the entire time. The countries still loose out overall. They're starting with college degrees already, and these people could help significantly by being engineers and such in their home countries.

Honestly, I don't begrudge them wanting better for themselves and their family if they send money home (would do the same myself), I'm just looking at it from a national perspective.

Re:Brain drain, ver 0.1

[corbettw]

Not as much of a win as keeping them in-country the entire time. Except that impoverished countries are missing another critical element to escaping poverty: capital. When their best and brightest go forth and earn lots of money, then either send it home or come back, it acts as a catalyst that can fuel further development.

Even in countries with lots of natural resources (Nigeria, for example), there's very little if any capital floating around. You can't expect someone to create a multi-billion dollar company from scratch.

Re:Brain drain, ver 0.1

[eennaarbrak]

O FFS, using extreme examples like Sierra Leone to generalize about Africa is just ridiculous. I live in South Africa, and there are a lot of bright people here, both South Africans and from other African countries. We need an initiative like this - if some of the people choose to leave with their skills, so be it, but many will choose to stay and apply their knowledge here. With your reasoning: Maybe the USA should stop building universities, because we all know Noth American countries like Nicaragua and Honduras are dirt poor and just a waste of any attempt at excellence.

Re:Einstein is over-rated

[sm62704]

Race has nothing to do with it. Look at yourself; dumb as a box of rocks.

Put any kid of any race (say, your kid) in a third world country with little food, no medical care, and have unlearned people raise him, and don't send him to school, and he'll be just like the native Africans.

Take one of those African kids and raise him in an enlightened industrial society and he'll excel as much as anyone. It isn't about self esteem, it's about quality of life.

As to your own stupidity, racism is a tool of the rich to keep everyone else at each others' throats so they won't notice who's really using and abusing them, tool.

Re:The purpose?

[PikachuMolester2007]

Not quite sure why people assume all of the Africa is starving or lacks critical infrastructure. Take a look at the pictures on the wikipedia entry for Johannesburg, for comparison sake. There are definitely places in Africa where physicists, engineers and scientists of all types can, and are, earning a decent living.

Re:Einstein didn't create much wealth

[megaditto]

Unfortunately, theoretical physics is not very practical and therefore does not create much wealth. You are kidding, right?

I don't even know where to begin, but here are some counterexamples of theoretical physics being quite practical: nuclear fission reactors, fusion weapons, transistors/microchips, computers, internet, TVs, sattelites/GPS, cell phones and wireless comms, MRI and PET scans, electron microscopy, LASERs...

See, I think you are making the same mistake of underestimating theoretical physics as the Germans did in the 1930s...

Re:Small Pool of Healthy

[crazybit]

Many exceptional athletes: soccer players (Didier Drogba), marathon runners, sprint runners, long distance jumpers, etc. come from Africa.

If their eating habits didn't stop them from becoming champions, why should the same food affect possible geniuses?

Re:Einstein didn't create much wealth

[bitrex]

Something like: "Theoretical physicists turn money into ideas. Engineers turn ideas into money."

Re:Einstein is over-rated

[TerranFury]

If a black man did something horrible to you or your family, you have my sympathies.

A member of my family was beaten to death by a black man in the street. It happened before I was born. Routine mugging gone awry. She spent the rest of her "life" in pain and a vegetative state. It was the woman who raised my mother.

I don't blame race. I blame human nature. Most people of any color are just vicious animals running on fear and greed and desperation.

But I like to think -- or, I hope -- that I am a man and not a beast. And I believe that to be this I need, constantly, to overcome the paranoia that would make me a fearful animal and not a man. I believe abject racism is just one more form of animal paranoia.

I do not believe in a utopia where race does not matter. I learned that again in college, and it was my saddest lesson. You see, racist Chinese people say the same things about white men that you say about blacks -- that they (we) are fetishists, perverts, rapists, deviants, and worse. I learned this the hard way when, for six months, I dated a nice and good-looking girl from Shanghai. People said nasty things, whispered snide comments -- particularly two kinds of people: (1) uneducated whites, and (2) racist Chinese people. My mind's eye saw the caricature of the racist white man -- sitting on his front porch, spitting tobacco, and saying, "Watch out! Them watermelon-eating niggers take our women!" morphing into a Chinese student who was pointing at me, and the "nigger" becoming a stereotyped "Westerner" with my face. She was a nice girl, and though we did not have enough in common to continue the relationship -- our value systems were moving rapidly apart, and it became more and more clear that we, in basic philosophy, wanted very different things -- we certainly did not deserve the kind of comments we received. It was insulting to me and dehumanizing to her: The assumption by her "own people" seemed to be that she could not possibly be appealing as a human being, that the only reason anyone could want to date her was that he were sick, that he were some kind of twisted pervert and that the only appealing quality she could possibly have was the ethnicity she happened to come from. She had warned me when we started that people would say these things, and I had replied naively that it didn't matter, but I guess in fact I had really thought it wouldn't happen enough that it could matter. I had to learn the hard way that this wasn't true. It was severely disillusioning.

I do not want to be like those people who spoke insults and acid. I do not believe in utopia, but I reject their petty tribalism, and I am a better man than they were.

Are you? Are you a better man? A thinking, reasoning being with thoughts as well as instincts? Or are you a beast yourself?

I'm not asking you to change your mind immediately. I'm not telling you to discard what you think just because people call it "racism:" having a name for an idea and saying "it's bad" doesn't by itself mean it's wrong. I'm just asking you to moderate your thoughts for a bit, to let the man overcome the beast. Because I think -- or hope -- that in time and with thoughtfulness, you will conclude differently than you do now -- and I don't think bitterness is a very good route to peace for society, or to happiness for yourself.

Cheers.