Why has there been no new Einstein?
How can a single human make so many breakthrough discoveries?
And how come, despite our supercomputers, global research networks, and instant access to virtually all human knowledge, we haven't seen another Einstein?
This is a question I’ve been pondering for years.
I've identified five puzzle pieces that, taken together, start to hint at a convincing answer.
Let's talk about them one by one.
Education
Einstein received aristocratic tutoring.
Max Talmud introduced the young 12-year-old Albert to geometry. His uncle taught him algebra.
This type of path- and goalless tutoring that plants seeds of curiosity and teaches intellectual agency through osmosis has become extinct.
Tutoring nowadays is always focused on improving grades in specific tests.
Entourage
Before taking up his post at the patent office in Bern, Einstein offered private lessons in mathematics and physics to make a living.
One of the students that replied to his newsletter ad, Maurice Solovine, quickly became a good friend.
The two began to meet regularly to discuss physics and philosophy. Soon a former neighbor of Einstein also joined the discussions regularly.
They started to call their gatherings Akadamie Olympia. Guests sometimes joined.
They discussed their own works in progress and books like Karl Pearson's The Grammar of Science and Henri Poincaré's La Science et l'Hypothèse (Science and Hypothesis), John Stuart Mill's A System of Logic, David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, Baruch Spinoza's Ethics, and Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote.
These gatherings played a significant role in Einstein's intellectual development leading straight to his annus mirabilis.
Students nowadays are far too busy with structured coursework for goalless intellectual pursuits like this.
Deep intellectual curiosity is also far rarer thanks to the modern school system and all the distractions that constantly compete for our attention.
As a result, there is no critical mass to form their own Akademia Olympia in most people’s personal networks.
Exposure
Einstein was exposed to the right problems at the right time.
One of the books they discussed at Akademia Olympia, Henri Poincaré's La Science et l'Hypothèse, lays out precisely the problems Einstein solved during his annus mirabilis.
Maurice Solovine reported that Poincaré's book kept them "breathless for weeks on end".
What is today's equivalent to Henri Poincaré's La Science et l'Hypothèse?
I’m not sure there is one.
Science has become far more specialized.
There are few researchers that have a full grasp of their field and its problems.
Book’s à la La Science et l’Hypothèse are not valued in today’s academic system.
And most researchers are far too busy writing grant applications and churning out incremental papers anyway.
Exploration
In the years leading up to his annus mirabilis, Einstein had the freedom to explore instead of being constrained by definable objectives. (Later in his life he lost this when he became fixated on the idea of a unified field theory.)
There is no way to get funding for open exploration in the current academic system.
Despite there being more professional researchers than ever, everyone is too busy carrying incremental research.
It’s publish or perish. To publish, you need results. To get results reliably, you need to pursue safe, incremental research with predictable outcomes.
Even though many people are aware that their research is “almost certainly bullshit”, no one is able to escape the chains of the academic system. In its present form, it only rewards hill climbers but not valley crossers.
The best way to win a grant is to write proposals that are perfect compromises; equivalents of the color purple in fashion.
Good enough to satisfy everyone, sure not to offend anyone, but ultimately mediocre, diluted, toothless, and forgettable.
As Joel Lehman and Kenneth Stanley convincingly argue in their book:
“Seeking consensus prevents traveling down interesting stepping stones because people don’t agree on what the most interesting stepping stones are. And resolving this kind of disagreement often leads to a compromise between opposing stepping stones. […] So when consensus is sought in exploration, the result is a generic washout effect. Instead of allowing each person to discover their own chains of stepping stones, the system squashes a diversity of opinions into a generic average. Perhaps then it would make sense sometimes to reward maximal disagreement instead of agreement. It’s possible that anti-consensus may be more interesting than bland agreement. After all, attracting a unanimous vote in science could be a sign of nothing more than echoing the status quo. If you’re doing whatever is hot and parrot the right buzzwords, you might be able to attract wide support. On the other hand, an interesting idea is likely to split votes. At the border between our present knowledge and the unknown are questions whose answers remain uncertain. That’s why the opinions of experts should diverge in such uncharted territory. It’s in this wild borderland between the known and the unknown that we should want our greatest minds probing, rather than within the comfortable vacation-spot of maximal consensus. If experts all agree that an idea is terrible, as in poor, poor, poor, poor, then there’s no evidence that it’s worth pursuing. But when experts radically disagree with each other, something interesting is happening.”
Ecosystem
Einsteins Annus Mirabilis famously happened outside the academic system.
But instead of taking any lessons from this, modern academia has become even more rigid and institutionalized.
As a result of the Second World War, the number of PhDs in physics exploded.
The scientific community is very different in the era of Big Science.
To quote Samuel Goldsmit:
“A quarter of a century ago, we could exchange ideas in Bohr’s study with no government secrets, weapons programs, or spy cases to bother us. … None of us were distracted by offers to become college presidents or big wheels in industry, and governments didn’t give a hoot about physicists. There was no trying to elbow one’s way to power, for the simple reason that there wasn’t any place to exercise power. No huge laboratories, no military projects. … We all felt that we belonged to a sort of lodge, with a worldwide membership of only four hundred or so, and everyone knew everyone else well—or at least knew what everyone else was doing. Now four times that number will turn up for a meeting of just American physicists, and most of them will be strangers to each other.”
The reason why Einstein was able to make scientific contributions outside the system was because the scientific community was small enough.
When Einstein, with no scientific affiliation at the time, submitted his groundbreaking papers, the physics community was small enough to take notice and take it seriously.
The small, tight-knit community meant ideas could flow between insiders and outsiders.
There was no need for peer review.
Only one out of Einstein’s 300 papers was peer reviewed.
Nature introduced external pre-publication review only in 1973.
Editors decided what got published, often only relying on personal connections and informal recommendations.
In the pre-WWII era, editors actively solicited articles from personal connections or filled in gaps in journals themselves. Editors were happy to receive article submissions.
Today? It’s the exact opposite.
With hundreds of researchers in every field fighting for a tiny number of secure positions, always ranked against each other based on their publication records and citation counts, it’s no wonder journals are flooded with submissions.
The current situation is summarized by the following joke in David Lindley’s book A Different Universe:
“The Physical Review is now so voluminous that stacking up successive issues would generate a surface traveling faster than the speed of light-although without violating relativity because the Physical Review contains no information.”
Most professors barely know their students, let alone introduce them to their colleagues.
So a paper by a until-then mediocre PhD with no academic affiliation would most likely be ignored or rejected outright in today's system.
Moreover, many historic paradigm-shifting papers like Turing's founding paper for computer science barely deserve that name by modern standards.
But that is saying more about our modern standards than about the quality of those papers.
In summary, the absence of a "new Einstein" isn't due to a lack of brilliant minds or scientific potential, but rather to the systematic dismantling of the conditions that made Einstein possible.
Today's rigid educational system, the scarcity of deep intellectual communities, the hyperspecialization of science, the pressure for incremental progress, and the bureaucratization of academia have created an environment that would likely have stifled even Einstein himself.
Until we can recreate the conditions that fostered revolutionary thinking in the past, we will continue to see diminishing returns in scientific breakthroughs.
Jealousy.
Mutual jealousy.