The Rise and Fall of the Gentleman Scientist
I still say the only education worth anything is self-education.
-Robert Frost
A gentleman scientist is a financially independent scientist who pursues scientific study without direct affiliation of a public institution. Charles Darwin, Nikola Tesla, Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, Robert Boyle, and John Dalton were all gentlemen scientists.
They pursued research through independent means rather than by institutional funding. They were financially independent — instead of spending their spare time enjoying the vices of their day, they sought to better the world. Maybe it was for pride or ego, but the effect of their accomplishments is still felt today. These men lived during the age of the inventor… an age that seems mostly gone. We try and rationalize that it still exists with certain people, but it’s teams doing work… not one person with an assistant.
It used to be almost commonplace for gentlemen scientists to make profound new discoveries that would significantly increase the limits of human knowledge. Nowadays, big leaps are extraordinarily rare and most progress comes from large private and public institutions. What changed?
I assume people aren’t getting stupider. From most accounts, John von Neumann was the smartest man to have ever lived, and he’s been dead for awhile. But the Flynn Effect shows each subsequent generation getting more intelligent, although it has leveled off and potentially reversed in countries with the highest HDI.
There used to be greener pastures. As humanity progresses, we keep learning and taking over new areas of universal knowledge. A successful and effective exploration of science today requires resources far beyond the levels necessary for the pursuit of a hobby. There are many amateur astronomers, for example, and a few do make discoveries, but a single person working alone in their spare time on any topic of real significance would be outpaced by the field. I think the lack of independent scientists is due to the fact that most practical science that can be done in a private home, has already been done.
I’m sure there are plenty of independent theorists, but we may not hear about them as they’re outside academia and academia may not respect their theories. There are also many independent inventors, although the level of actual science going into these inventions is questionable. This includes parts of the biohacking community. New discoveries require very expensive and specialized equipment because that is what’s left. The low hanging scientific fruit has long since been picked. In order for a scientist to do her job, she has to go where the money is to get the tools to do her research.
It’s easy for pop culture and the layman to look at things high level and say “this is how this works.” When in reality, there are oftentimes numerous exceptions. When trying to fix and model things out like the immune system, it’s a bottomless pit of info, and this is just a super high level view of the immune system.
We stand on the shoulders of giants*, which include many a gentleman scientists, but also many amazing teams who accomplished things no one person could have ever done. Today, we need systems thinkers. People who can understand how systems work at a high level and align incentives to fix them. It’s not as simple as one person in a garage building something. Things are too complicated now.
The world isn’t designed top down Hollywood style. Could a genius now, travel into the past and create a computer? No! This gives a good explanation for why. Things are way more complicated than we let on. One of my favorites is Milton Friedman’s example of how no single person knows how to make an object as simple as the common pencil. It’s everyone contributing to make a better whole with incentive structures to provide carrots for doing so along the way. Whether the carrots be fame, money, power, pride, prestige.
There’s this pervasive view that there’s one genius behind everything great that happens at a company. This is false. People will take credit… as they say, success has many fathers. Even John von Neumann worked with others and organized groups of super talented people to work on the most difficult problems of their age. Scientific historians credit him saying his greatest genius was assembling all the other great minds of his age to work as one. Von Neumann was a systems thinker at the highest level, while going deep.
It’s easy to abstract away, but to build anything of value, you must dive deep. A friend at Amazon says that’s what they call it when their assumptions are challenged. Amazon’s management is notorious for going into every detail and second guessing every assumption.
There are the counterpoints — we have independent researchers in the field like Dr. Craig Venter, who creates fundraising campaigns to perform empirical research that isn’t just picking at low-lying fruits. Einstein, who was definitely not picking at low-lying fruits, was a gentleman scientist, however, it took money and time to physically prove Einstein’s theories. The video game Braid was an amazing work of art and game design. I wouldn’t classify it as science, but it was insanely impressive that one person created it by themselves. So yes, it’s still possible to be a gentleman scientist. Just extremely unlikely.
Will gentlemen scientists become a thing again in the future? Maybe if AI programming is democratized? But the sovereign individual today, is the individual who can convince other great minds to work for them. Given my current understanding of how the world works, we need teams of super intelligent people to build and understand systems. The man in a lab by himself, tinkering away, whether a savior or mad scientist is a dying breed.
*Outside science/engineering, the fact that we have a functioning legal system and rule of law is us standing on the shoulders of giants as well.
