National styles in graduate training

The American physicist visiting an academic physics laboratory in Europe will find himself very much at home. The young men and women use the types of research equipment with which he is familiar, and talk about the same fashionable scientific problems. The questions asked in seminars and conferences are equally searching, the topics of lecture courses have the same titles, the standards of published research are entirely comparable. A young physicist from another European country who applies to do advanced research in Bristol may be assumed to have the same level of understanding and research experience as his British or American counterparts. One may even expect a working knowledge of the lingua franca of modern science—Broken English.

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