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The End of Individual Genius?
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.'"
None of us are as dumb as all of us.
It may sound romantic that a lone genius comes along and changes everything, but its not a good thing in practice, nor, for the most part, is it even true.
There have been great people that came along and made breakthroughs, but always this was the result of their building work of others.
The myth of the lone scientist is just that, a myth. Newton, to pick an example of the 'great man working alone' wasn't the only one working in his field, he just 'rewrote' a lot of history to make this seem the case. We don't even use his version of calculus, but everyone still credits him.
Einstein too extended the work of many others. He did a lot of thinking on his own, but everything he did was an extension of the work of others. I'm not saying he wasn't smart, he was, but how much faster would his work have arrived had he been working in a group the whole time?
This trend of working in groups can do naught but good.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
It's possible that this is due in part to the sheer amount of bureaucracy that goes on in academia these days. Perhaps these collaborative papers are written by one genius, backed up by one or more people who know how to secure the funding and generally get things done.
I can certainly back this up, from my experience the first author on a paper does 80% of the work, the next few work in the same lab and contributed in some minor way and the last few are the people you put on the grant application to have any chance of getting money.
In my view, TFA has got it very wrong because the writer has romanticized a fictitious "lone scientist" into existence. In reality, so-called "lone scientists" never work or think alone at all, and they never have. Instead, scientific thinking always takes place within an international sea of ideas.
Throughout all of history, scientific progress has always occurred within a framework of communication between thinking people, and those thought processes arise out of education in the relevant subjects followed by extremely extensive reading and discussing of ideas with others. New scientific insight has never popped out of nothing by some sort of magic. Novel ideas arise only by alternative analysis of other people's published or communicated thoughts.
Instead of the lone scientist being at a disadvantage now versus large organized groups, the opposite may even be true because of the Internet. Never before have lone individuals had so much up-to-date information at their disposal (including research data), and never before have they had the means to communicate with others so easily. This suggests that the lone scientist has a lot going for him or her today, at least in part.
Science contains two parts however, a theoretical one and an experimental one, and there is no doubt that the experimental side of science benefits hugely from good funding. However, you need the germ of a new idea before you can turn it into a theory let alone test it, and new ideas don't spring up directly through funding --- it's a more complex relationship.
Large research groups certainly provide a good environment for high-bandwidth scientific discussion among peers in a scientific discipline, but even those scientists will be communicating with others worldwide, particularly through conferences and publications, and so they're still adding to the international sea of ideas which is the real bedrock of science. Things haven't really changed much.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
It's kind of weird the article compares Einstein - a theoretician - with large experimental / engineering enterprises such as Sputnik or CERN. Theoretical and experimental physics are two very different beasts (that don't always even get along), and to my knowledge, there aren't any grand collaborations in theoretical physics (still done on a small / individual scale).
large groups to do science is simply the cost and complexity of experiments. Nowadays very few groundbreaking experiments can be done in your garage, you need access to expensive machines(and often lots of energy) in order to conduct your research. And since they probably won't hand the keys to the LHC(once its repaired) to some upstart grad student with a new theory, it becomes necessary to spend vast amounts of time "proving" yourself while building the necessary connections to see your experiment come to fruition.
I think this study is partially flawed because they only look at Nobel prize winners, which exclude fields like Mathematics(where no labs are necessary in many cases). If mathematicians are getting older then I would be more inclined to believe their conclusion.
Monstar L
This title is misleading. There are many types of genius outside of math and physics.
Artists, authors, composers, financial gurus, etc. can all be geniuses. To limit the definition of genius to a scientist is to discard most the minds who have greatly contributed to our society.
I'm not saying the submitter did this out of malice, but there is definitely a negative "stereotype" in the scientific community about intelligent people who do non-science-related work.
When the education system institutionalizes you for 30 years and tells you what the world looks like, how the hell are you supposed to actually see it when you're finally released?
Geniuses need to see the world for themselves.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Thinking 'generally' might lead you to false conclusions. In my opinion the optimal 'head count' varies from venture to venture, there is no general panacea. More people can help, more people can get in the way.
Large groups of people confirmed Einstein's ideas, granted. What confirmed ideas or reactors would there be today if not for that one unique man? Zip.
Nikola Tesla comes to my mind when you speak of Edison, incidentally, which was truly a scientific and creative genius while Edison, while far from a simpleton, don't get me wrong, was more of a gifted entrepreneur and obstinate tinkerer.
Anyway, if individual genius is dead it is because we are killing it. Society seems to me to be heading more and more in path of collectivism and thus less and less incentive for individual achievement. Damn shame if you ask me. :(
Send your spendthrift head of state this
The more brains you have on a project generally means the faster it gets done(note I did say Generally).
This is the concept that an IT consultant once described as "using nine women to produce a baby in one month." Beyond a certain critical mass, generally not higher than about seven people, adding more people slows down R&D work. Larger groups can work effectively only if they divide themselves into smaller teams working on well-defined parts of the job.
Even armies have figured this out -- modern armies may be huge and complex organizations, but the smallest tactical unit is a squad of about ten people, much like the Roman contubernium.
Indeed Einstein did not work in complete isolation: Much of the mathematical framework for the theory of relativity was explored by Poincare and Lorentz. And he corresponded about his ideas with others. Nevertheless, theoretical physics at this level is a highly individual activity, because ultimately it is all about thinking and testing concepts in a mathematical framework.