Mixed Reactions to ‘No New Einstein’

Lee Smolin gives some very good reasons for the modern lack of Einstein-type scientists. I can add some reasons that exist in Denmark.

Here PhD students are generally treated like employees and are chosen with increasing frequency to perform short, narrowly defined tasks in connection with, for example, projects funded by the European Union. Instead of receiving financial support to study a novel problem under a professor’s guidance, PhD students are increasingly left to fill in the blanks on projects that are already well defined; the projects are all laid out in a contract already, it seems, and the students have little room in their schedules for developing individual projects. Some typical EU-funded PhD projects are simply uninspiring and tend to involve programming and computer data-wrangling. These are not unimportant skills, of course, but a PhD study should also include time for creative thinking, especially as the end of school approaches.