As far as I can see, the main issue in the discussion of “Why No ‘New Einstein’?” is whether increased funding and better organization can produce more Einsteins per century. Lee Smolin holds the positive view, while Paul Roman disagrees.
A possible clue to resolving the issue lies in Lev Landau’s classification of outstanding genius physicists, as narrated by his close associate Evgeny Lifshitz at a talk given in 1974 at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy. According to Landau’s classification, Isaac Newton received the highest rank, 0, followed by Albert Einstein at a rank of 0.5, then by Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Paul Dirac, Satyendra Nath Bose, Eugene Wigner, and a few others at 1, and so on. Landau had given himself a modest rank of 2.5. The classification continued to the rank of 5 for mundane physicists.
It is tempting to consider the Smolin–Roman debate in the light of the Landau classification. The principle of better funding and more purposive organization, which is the bedrock of Smolin’s thesis, seems to work fairly well for ranks numerically greater than 3, largely on “statistical” grounds. To cite another example, young workers from developing countries, who would usually rank at 4 to 5 on the Landau scale, considerably increase their productivity in the environments of ICTP and CERN, but are not often able to maintain the same tempo on getting back to their home environments. However, the principle’s effectiveness tends to decrease rapidly for physicists ranked in the opposite direction. Actually, the critical value of 2.5 is signal enough against the idea that highly talented physicists can be mass produced. Below that value, one should have genuine doubts about the working of Smolin’s thesis, which leaves the field open for Roman’s counter-thesis to come into play. Indeed, by the time a physicist reaches rank of 1 on the Landau classification, the idea that an organized and structured environment is best for the mass production of talent probably fails altogether.
Let me illustrate with a concrete example from physics the hazards of thinking that talent can be mass produced. After the success of the Glashow-Weinberg-Salam theory of electroweak interactions, serious attempts were made worldwide to generalize the GWS framework so as to also include the strong-interaction sector within its ambit and thus pave the way for a grand unified theory of all three interactions. But Nature did not yield to such preposterous demands to conform to tailor-made theories. The ambition for mass production of Einsteins must contend with such a reality.
