The death of a leading scientist can lead to flurry of cutting-edge research by new entrants. That is the conclusion of “Does science advance one funeral at a time?” by Pierre Azoulay, Christian Fons-Rosen and Joshua Graff Zivin. The trio of economists looked at what happened after the unexpected deaths of 452 researchers who worked, somewhat ironically, in the life sciences.
They found a strong interdisciplinary effect in how a star scientist is replaced. “To our surprise,” they write, “it is not competitors from within a subfield that assume the mantle of leadership, but rather entrants from other fields that step in to fill the void created by a star’s absence”. Indeed, they noted an 8.6% increase in papers by new entrants to subfields that had been dominated by deceased stars.
The sudden absence of top researchers has a significant negative effect on their collaborators – with the trio finding a 20.7% decrease in papers by scientists who had previously co-authored papers with the stars.
There is a physics connection because the effect seems to have been postulated many years ago by Max Planck, who wrote, “A great scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it”.
The researchers have dubbed the effect “Planck’s Principle” and you can read more about it in this news article from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Should scientists have to swear an oath promising to behave morally in the course of their research activities? Quantum-information guru Scott Aronson says he is in “broad support of the idea” to create a Hippocratic oath for STEM researchers. And to get us thinking about what such an oath should contain, he has posted his own 10-point version that he calls his “nerdocratic oath”.
Finally, please watch this brilliant video of what at first appears to be an astronaut walking on the Moon. I won’t ruin the surprise of where the footage was actually taken.
