Where have the great scientists gone?

Can anyone name three great scientists of the modern age? Those who have become household names and have changed the way we think? Stephen Hawking is probably the last scientist that comes to mind – and he made his famous discoveries on gamma radiation of black holes in 1974.

Where have all the giants gone? Ever since Copernicus, science has always had heroes. Those who transformed the way we look at the world and advanced our scientific understanding. Names like Louis Pasteur, Kelvin, Einstein, and Faraday. And more recently in the 20th century, we had the giants of quantum mechanics – Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac, Feynman, Chandrasekhar and many others.

But ask someone to name a few scientists in the past 40 years, and you come up with a blank. No one, not even a single person springs to mind no matter what the field. Talk about economics? John Nash achieved fame way back in 1950 with his “Nash Equilibriums.” Astrophysics? Stephen Hawkings in 1974. Edwin Hubble died in 1953. Particle physics or relativity? Though our knowledge has advanced quite a bit, there are no distinctive names that spring to mind in recent times. Computer science? Jon Von Neumann died in 1957. Alan Turing in 1954.

Where have all the great scientists gone??

Great Scientists are no more
Great scientists are no more

Looks like whenever I read about scientific research, I only hear about funding. It’s all about money. Bigger particle accelerators. Bigger grants. Bigger teams. Where have all the bold individuals gone? It seems as if nothing is possible in science these days unless you have the backing of a governmental organization with lots of money or a corporation who wants to profit off the research. Who do we look up to? Who do our young scientists hold up as a role model in recent times and say “I want to be like him or her”?

Many different lists have been made of the greatest scientists in history. And not one of them contains an entry after 1950. Most stop at Stephen Hawking, if not earlier. There can be only two reasons for this.

  1. We understand the universe so well that only those with huge resources can find out something new
  2. The scientific environment isn’t conducive to these maverick geniuses

If the first point is the reason, then there’s not much we can do. But science is full of examples where people thought they knew everything. In 1900 Lord Kelvin is famously supposed to have claimed “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement”. Have we finally reached that stage, or are we as wrong as he was? I don’t know.

But if the first point is false, then the second must be true. Perhaps it’s no longer enough to be a genius. Maybe you also have to be a politician. Perhaps you need to have “people skills” and learn to work with others and pull the right strings. But most geniuses hate authority. They rebel. They work alone. And they’re mostly not very social. There’s a latin quotation which goes:

Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit – “There has never been any great genius without an element of madness”

If this is true, does our system allow these slightly reclusive geniuses to flourish? Or has science become so institutionalized by the government and corporations that there’s simply no place for them anymore? I don’t have the answers. I only know that the days of the great scientists may be dead. And I hope with all my heart that many years later someone glancing at this article laughs and says “Look how wrong he was!”

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33 thoughts on “Where have the great scientists gone?”

  1. I think you are making a mistake by looking into the past and comparing it to the present. The new Einsteins are around today, but we don’t know it yet. Nash was pretty much unknown until ‘A beautiful mind’ and Feynman too was famous towards the end of his career. Even Einstein was probably pretty much unknown when his famous ‘three papers’ cam e out at the start of the last century.

    The past appears to be full of ‘greats’ because they’ve had time to be recognized as such. Their work has been confirmed, the technological results have come out, they’ve been awarded the nobel and other awards, they’ve had biographies written, etc, etc, etc. All this takes time. Come back in 30 years and people will be able to tell you who today’s great scientists were.

    Colum

    Reply

    • In reply to Colum Paget

      Einstein, Feynman, Newton, Bohr etc. were celebrities in their day. They were household names. I would be astonished if the average Joe today could name three famous scientists still living. Lots of scientists were very well recognized indeed in their time.

      Einstein was very young when his paper came out in 1905 and he became even more famous in 1915 after his general theory was published. So it simply not true that all famous scientists were recognized “30 years later” as you put it.

      In any case, even if one were to grant the premise, it simply means that 30 years ago the world was remarkably devoid of great scientists!

      But as I said, I don’t buy the basic premise.

      Reply

  2. 1. Average Joe can certainly name three living scientists, probably many more. But the names chosen will depend on which average Joe you pick up—of what nation, of what inclinations, etc. And, the issues of recognizibility and greatness indeed are separate, even if they are not exactly orthogonal to each other.

    … Overall, I am not even sure what your basic query is: Is it about the lack of great scientists? Or is it about their being not household names? Come to think of it, apart from teasing your readers, I am not even sure if you have a query in the first place!

    2. There are different historical and cultural contexts to each era. Including the issue of what professions or occupations fascinate the average Joe. Let me jot down what seem disparate points:

    You repeatatively compare the post-1980’s period with the first half of the 20th century. Ok, you do marginally mention Newton, but, notably, you mention none from, say, the 18th or 19th centuries—James Watt, Faraday, Gauss… . That’s one mildly irritating habit of the post-1980s people concerned with popular culture and science—they always mention Newton and Einstein in the same breath, bypassing the entire 19th century (and also the 17th and 18th ones).

    Alright. If you have to compare those two periods there also are some “great” differences: There have been no “great” (world) wars post-1980s; there were two in the I half of the 20th c. The emphasis has been more on technology than on basic physics, making the current period better comparable to Watt’s times rather than to Joule’s/Boltzmann’s. Regardless of what physics students think (or taught), technological breakthroughs open up fresh lines of inquiry into basic physics, infusing a fresh blood of ideas, too (just the way breakthroughs in basic physics leads to technological revolutions, as in Einstein’s prediction materializing in lasers.) (BTW, a similar intertwined relation exists between mathematics and physics—good physics leads to breakthroughs in mathematics, regardless of the mathematicians’ quite frequent but equally ridiculous (Platonic) claim that they work out everything in advance and then physicists “discover” the referents in reality to their ideas.) If so, perhaps there is saturation in theoretical physics and it is waiting for technological breakthroughs to pose new fundamental theoretical challenges for itself. Remember, Planck’s quantization had motivations rooted in wanting to better understand the cavity radiation, which in turn was a worthy topic only because the electric bulbs had freshly been invented and the race was on to study and find better materials and processes that emit more light more cheaply.

    With that said, what can you say as the ballpark estimate of the progress made in the post-1980s era? Obviously: computers, the telecommunications revolution. Now, here, you tell me, which “Joe” hasn’t heard of Bill Gates? May be, even of Steve Jobbs?

    Now, how does that relate to the main point? Here’s how. As Blumel notes in the preface of his *undergraduate* *text-book* on quantum mechanics, a new quantum revolution may be underway right now—related to quantum computation. It is easy to see that this theoretical quest may be comparable to the pre-Planck studies of the cavity radiation. After all, nanotechnology may be hot in other areas, but faces the problem of consistently overcoming coagulation or clustering. The one place where it doesn’t have this sort of a basic hurdle to overcome is: quantum computers. A set of James Watts is paving the way for another set of Joules, Helmholtzs, Gibbs, Kelvins; or, if you wish: one set of Edisons is paving the way for another set of Plancks and Einsteins.

    I am aware that the post is long. (Say, I love it when the length hurts!) I wish to end by reproducing the following excerpt from Louisa Gilder’s (IMO easily put-downable) book:

    A paper is considered famous if it has been cited in more than a hundred subsequent papers; Einstein’s monumental papers on special relativity (1905) and the quantum theory (1917) have each been cited more than seven hundred times; his 1905 Ph.D. dissertation on the size of an atom, more than fifteen hundred times. By contrast, twenty-five hundred papers in physics journals have cited Bell’s 1964 paper on entanglement; the same as for the 1935 Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper that inspired him.

    You have studies physics. You can, hopefully, connect the dots together.

    Best,

    –Ajit
    (Written completely on the fly.)
    [E&OE]

    Reply

    • In reply to Dr. Ajit R. Jadhav

      I’m pretty sure the average person can’t name three scientists in any given field today. Test it and see.

      My post is first about us not knowing about famous scientists today. And secondly, I want to know whether or not this is because there aren’t any great scientists left.

      Indeed, you seem to basically agree with me that there haven’t been any major breakthroughs in theoretical physics in recent generations – apart from a lot of “fine tuning.” When we figure out what dark matter/energy is all about, that would be something for example.

      Reply

  3. To rub the salt on the injury, I shall hereby *add* to my above already lengthy comment.

    First of all, I regret a few typos: “studies” instead of “studied,” etc. Also, I must make myself more clear. I should have said: (Say, I love it when *I see* that the length *of the writeup* hurts *the reader*!) … Enough.

    Here are a few more notings.

    In case you bring up the 1964 date for Bell’s paper—it not being post-1980s: The Aspect experiment was done in the 1980s; more conclusive experiments were done even further later. If the above-quoted citation record is to go by, what does it say about the state of popular science writing? When is it going to come out of the “Newton-Einstein” fold, established only in the first half of the 19th century?And, of course, what does it say about the quality of the two thousand five hundred odd papers, out of which, I am sure, 99+% were sponsored by some or the other government?

    Let me go further in the same vein in which the above paragraph ends: If anything from the (proper) legacy of Ayn Rand’s is mentioned by anyone in a proper manner (e.g. by me, here), why is it that no average St. Stephen’s graduate finds it not worth responding? Or does it have to do with his cognitive inability rather than willingness? And, after observing that St. Stephen’s has produced generations of IAS etc. officers (and JNU professors), what does either answer imply or entail concerning the quality of education actually imparted at St. Stephen’s? And, to round up this point: If quantum entanglement and quantum computation are not the topics of undergraduate curricula in India, including at St. Stephen’s, to what extent are St. Stephen’s professors and alumni (including the IAS etc. officers) responsible for this state of education in India?

    One could go on, but enough for the time being.

    –Ajit
    [E&OE]

    Reply

  4. # Einstein, Feynman, Newton, Bohr etc. were celebrities in their day. They were household names.

    No, they were not. I was alive in Feynman’s day, in fact I was doing Physics at the university of Liverpool. I could have walked up and down the streets of Liverpool or Birmingham, and not found one person who knew who Feynman was (well, unless I ran into another phyics student, maybe). Worse, most people who were doing physics with me didn’t really know who Feynman was, and even less so Bohr.

    Everyone knew about Newton and Einstein, of course. However, Einstein, from what I can see, (I can’t be sure, I wasn’t there, I’m old, but not that old) mostly became a famous icon after WWII. He published his ‘big 3’ papers in 1905, and I think for a long time after that, he was still not a ‘household name’.

    I would suggest that Bohr and Feynman are not even household names today. I’m confident that no-one at my work place would know who they were. They would know Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking though (both of who are still living, so if they could name one more living scientist, they’d pass your test. However, I don’t think they could come up with a third).

    Dawkins has a high profile today, but back when he wrote the Selfish Gene in the 70’s, and through the 80’s he was largely unknown. Fame takes time (unless you are the Spice Girls or a Reality TV celeb, but it was ever thus. More people in rome would have known the names of the top gladiators than of the stoic philosophers).

    James Lovelock was given a high profile by the new-age moment.

    Fame takes time, often people become famous after they are dead (which is why so many artists, writers and thinkers who are famous today died penniless).

    It’s the same thing as the music you mention in another post. Get a time machine and jump into the future, and they’ll be able to tell you who today’s great scientists/thinkers/musicians/artists/writers were. Right now it’s still being decided.

    Colum

    Reply

    • In reply to Colum Paget

      Check out the story of Einstein. Wikipedia is a good place. Einstein was a recognized public figure just three years after his initial paper in 1905.

      Similarly, the page on Feynman explicitly mentions that he was one of the best known scientists in the world during his day.

      I can give you so many more examples of famous scientists in their lifetime. Marie Curie, Pasteur, Darwin, Faraday, Tesla, Banting…all of these people were widely recognized in their own time.

      Reply

  5. Here are some people for you, incidentally:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michio_Kaku
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilayanur_S._Ramachandran
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misha_Mahowald
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aditi_Shankardass
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Novoselov

    This guy:

    http://www.neuroscience.cam.ac.uk/directory/profile.php?aldorust

    Doesn’t even have a wikipedia page yet. Yet he’s the guy behind the famous ‘Israeli Day Care Center’ experiments in the new field of behavioral economics, that have shaken the foundations of what we thought we knew about economics. Watch out for the behavioral economists, there is a big struggle going on in the field that might well do to economics what quantum physics and relativity did to physics. But it’s not yet percolated through to main-stream awareness.

    It’s like everything, they are out there, and in 20 years we will know who they are. In 20 years we’ll be saying “Where are all the great scientists, like the people we had back in the 201x’s?”

    Reply

      • In reply to bhagwad

        So, if I say that we will know the results of the 2012 olympics in 2014, that’s illogical and untestable?

        To test it, you have only to wait the required time, and there’s nothing illogical about that.

        As for Feynman being a ‘household name in his day’, if WP is saying that, WP is *Wrong* I was alive and studying physics in his day. He was not a household name.

        I think you have moved the goal-posts, Feynman may have been well known in scientific circles in his day, that is very different to being a household name. I’m sure there are major scientific figures who are well known in scientific circles right now, but whom we do not know, because we move in those circles.

        Here’s an experiment. Go into a bar that’s fairly full (not a student bar, a town center bar with a range of people in it) and start asking them who Richard Feynman was, or Niels Bohr put it to that. I think you’ll discover how much of a household name these people are.

        If you really want to scare yourself, do the same experiment asking people “What do you understand a star (as in one in the sky) to be”. I recently did this experiment and 50% of people didn’t know.

        He

        Reply

      • In reply to Colum Paget

        Come, it’s a false analogy :) With the Olympics, we have an event that is more or less guaranteed to occur (not certain, but more or less certain) – so the chances of us knowing the winners in the future is pretty high.

        In this case, the very existence of the event itself is in doubt. So certainly, it’s testable – but only 30 years from now and is hardly expected to hold weight as a logical statement in the present no?

        In fact, saying that we’ll know the famous scientists 30 years from now is kind of begging the question of whether or not there are famous scientists today! You reach a conclusion based on the assumption of answering the question…

        I’m sure you’ll agree with me that there is a continuum of “well known” ranging from “total obscurity” to celebrity status. Even if one were to grant your assessment of Feynman’s popularity (and I’m willing to do so), it doesn’t mean that there haven’t been a lot of other scientists who have reached pretty high recognition in the past compared to today.

        Marie Curie was tremendously well known in her time – being the only physicist I think to have received two Nobels in her lifetime. There are numerable other such scientists who though might not have achieved the same “star” status, where pretty high up in the continuum. My assertion is that scientists today simply don’t have the same recognition.

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  6. What about the impact of high school level curricula on this? From what I remember, high school textbooks talked about most of the celebrity scientists mentioned by the OP, but failed to talk about more recent discoveries and scientists. High school level science mostly focuses on the basics and most of the science done in the last 50 years has been higher order refinement to our models (in some cases, extremely sophisticated work, but nonetheless details that wouldn’t be present in high school textbooks).

    Physicists are also WAY better than biologists at promoting themselves. The schrodinger equation, born-oppenheimer approximation, the bohr model, einstein’s theory of relativity, etc. PCR is not known as the Mullis reaction and Peter Agre didn’t name aquaporins “agreporins”. Maybe this is just a recent trend taking place in science as a whole. If it is, I think it is almost certainly bad for the profession. As a whole, scientists do a deplorable job of promoting themselves. While this may seem like a responsible and ethical trait, I think it negatively affects the profession as a whole and the money devoted to discovery. Doctors, lawyers, and suits get all the recognition because of their tireless self-promotion, despite their relatively anemic contributions.

    Reply

  7. Richard Dawkins, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku and Stephen Hawking are all very famous. Tyson and Kaku are constantly on TV and even if people couldn’t name them, I could garauntee that most would recognize them. Noam Chomsky and Jane Goodall could be two more famous scientists as well. Hell you could probably even throw out Bill Nye lol.

    Reply

    • In reply to Matthew Anderson

      Those are popular Science educators and writers.They are not famous for any ground breaking work of their own (not even Hawking despite his contribution with Hawking radiation ;Dawkins perhaps for Meme theory, which is rather poorly established, so the point still stands). Chomsky is NOT a scientist (his linguistics certainly isn’t) and he is popular for his politics.You do have a slight point with Goodall though she is known for her lifestyle with Apes rather than any insights she has provided about them(to the general public that is).

      I’d say Watson and Crick would be decent examples of modern day scientists know to the more educated public.Brian Greene of String Theory.Lewis Wolpert of developmental biology(though he would fall more in the Richard Dawkins fame section rather than Watson and Crick, and the same applies to Brian Greene).

      Which Scientist becomes popular in the public imagination is not something pre-decided.It is a matter of serendipity.And also text book curriculum,which in today’s public school education is so wrong and outdated that this may as well be a moot point.

      By the way, Feynman is not all that popular.Certainly not anywhere close to Einstein.I’ve known many scientists outside of physics who are not familiar with him.

      Reply

  8. In 1800’s London, Humphry Davy (future baronet) was like a rockstar for the educated public. By the 1930’s “Einstein” was a synonym for “genius.” Everything you know about chimpanzee behavior comes from Goodall. Don’t sell her short. But she’s one of the old guard now.

    Do we not know any new scientists because they are not being promoted, because they are always part of faceless teams, or because we, and the science journalists, just aren’t paying attention?

    But then, I couldn’t identify any of the scientists in your composite pic. Who are they?

    Reply

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