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Comment by goalieca | Hacker News Reader

Was academia terribly relevant in my field when I was a grad student? Nope. In general, the work was poorly supervised, not-reproducible, and the peer review process was completely broken. Students just wanted to graduate and professors just wanted tenure and funding points.

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Something has changed. I can't imagine Einstein's generation functioning like that.

Have pioneers of innovation moved to private corporations now that they have capital that rivals academia? Private companies can reward innovators with more than just credentials.

Bell Labs, Xerox Parc, Google Brain, OpenAI, Tesla, SpaceX, ...

Granted, this isn't even across all fields as they are not all economic drivers.

Something I often think about is how eccentric the leading researchers were in Einstein’s generation. Just look at a picture of the guy himself. Or consider Kurt Gödel, who starved to death when his wife was hospitalized because he could only eat food prepared by her.

Different times/cultures tend to put different personalities in charge, and that has a huge impact on what gets done. Overall I have a feeling the curious eccentrics are now out, and the charismatic corner cutters are in…

And even then, can you really put the two first in the same bag as the others ? I have the feeling their research scope were noticeably broader, no ?

Bell Labs was only pseudo private. The government required they have that research lab in exchange for being allowed to have a monopoly. One should also consider that institutions like that were partly so productive for being at the right place and time in history, when we were developing the tools to exploit the low hanging fruit nature has to offer us. That whole era, we snatched it all up quick. Spaceflight and such didn't stagnate after because we turned to idiots, but because mass and aerodynamic drag and Newton impose pretty inalienable constraints.

Source?

Book: "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation"

Thanks. Had a hunch that might be it ;-)

An excellent book that needs to be read carefully by many college students, including engineers, scientists, political scientists, and business students.

There is a similar book on DuPont's research labs, and I believe others regarding Kodak, Xerox, IBM, and other large industrial R&D operations.

See David Hounshell's Science and Corporate Strategy https://www.worldcat.org/title/science-and-corporate-strateg...

I was watching a good documentary about Bardeen and Shockley and their development of semiconductor tech in the 50s. The military got their hands on some of their samples and work and put together a team to try to work out how they were doing it. The scientists they were interviewing were very depressed because for every month of progress they made catching up to Bardeen and Shockley, those guys would be a further 3 months ahead of them by then.

My point is, you can make claims about Bell labs being semi private, but that doesn't explain why all the innovation happened at Bell Labs and not at some fully government run lab or the military. The government couldn't even keep up with them when they knew what to do, forget about the government actually initiating that kind of research.

In the last 50 years almost nothing has come out of government research. All innovation has occurred in the private sector, or privately owned research universities. At best, the government has succeeded in some cases where government funded academics managed to get private funding from industry.

And more relevant to the actual Einstein's generation (and the few before), GE, GM, Bayer, IBM, 3M...

Bell Labs and Xerox Parc are gone. OpenAI, Tesla and SpaceX are very different places, and Google has Alphabet that actually tries to be like those but fails. And I imagine that cutting funding from projects before they can mature is a large cause of that failure.

Well but Einstein wasn't an academic when he was doing his best work. After he became famous he became an academic in the USA and (I read somewhere) spent much of the rest of his life being quite depressed because he never again reached the epic highs he achieved in his 20s.

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