Maybe not from a Physics department, but from a research lab of IBM or similar. Do you have any examples from the reference class of Great Discoveries in Physics? If so, what fraction of them did not come from trained physicists?
Einstein was working at the patent office in 1905 while also working on his phd. He published his first annus mirabilis paper in March, was awarded his phd is April and published the remaining papers in May, June and September. He didn’t take a position as a lecturer until 1908. This means Einstein was outside of physics while publishing his papers on Brownian motion, Special Relativity and Mass-Energy equivalence. Or did I miss something?
My understanding is that this was a normal career path at the time and the fact that he was not paid by the university after getting his degree is no more evidence of him being outside the physics department than his not being paid by the university before completing it.
Added: But it is relevant that this isn’t normal today.
My best take on the thing is that, historically, most great physics discoveries were made by generalist, wide-branching natural philosophers. Granted, “natural philosophy” is arguably the direct ancestor of physics from which spawned the bastards of “chemistry” and “biology”, but even regardless, the key point is that they were generalists and that, if we were going to solve the current problem simply by throwing more specialized physicists and gamma ray guns at it, this is not the evidence I’d expect to see.
Given historical base rates of generalists vs specialists in physics, and the ratio of Great Discoveries made by the former rather than the latter, it feels as if generalists have a net advantage in “consolidating” recent research into a Great Discovery.
I do have to agree, though, that all of them came from physicists, if not necessarily formally trained, although in most cases they were. Good knowledge of physics is necessary, that I won’t argue. But what I’ll point out is that I’ve personally met many more game developers and programmers with a much better grasp of (basic) physics (i.e. first volume of Feynman’s Lectures) than college physics department members, on a purely absolute count. It doesn’t seem that far-fetched, to me, to assume there’s a comparable difference in base rates of people within and outside physics departments with a solid enough grasp of physics for the Next Great Discovery, whatever that threshold may be (and obviously, the lower the actual threshold, the more likely it is that it will come from outside Physics Departments).
I am hard pressed to think of any significant discovery in the last 100 years or so which was not made by specialists (granted, often with a wide view of things). I’m sure there are some, but likely only a tiny fraction. If you look through the list of Nobel laureates in Physics, Chemistry and Biology, do you find any “generalists” there? Or, assuming the Nobel committee is biased toward the establishment, inspired by “generalists”?
To expand on shminux’s point about what has happened in the last 100 years that’s different: There’s a serious lack of low-hanging fruit. Ideas are more complicated and the simple ideas that a generalist has any chance to find have to a large extent already been discovered. Note also that in fact it is well before 100 years ago that this trend already started. Darwin, Maxwell, Faraday and many other 19th century researchers were already specialists by most notions of the term. So really this trend has been going on for almost 200 years.
Maybe not from a Physics department, but from a research lab of IBM or similar. Do you have any examples from the reference class of Great Discoveries in Physics? If so, what fraction of them did not come from trained physicists?
The obvious example example of a (/several) great discovery(s) in physics by someone outside of a physics department is Einstein.
Grad students count as people in physics departments.
From my reading of Wikipedia:
Einstein was working at the patent office in 1905 while also working on his phd. He published his first annus mirabilis paper in March, was awarded his phd is April and published the remaining papers in May, June and September. He didn’t take a position as a lecturer until 1908. This means Einstein was outside of physics while publishing his papers on Brownian motion, Special Relativity and Mass-Energy equivalence. Or did I miss something?
My understanding is that this was a normal career path at the time and the fact that he was not paid by the university after getting his degree is no more evidence of him being outside the physics department than his not being paid by the university before completing it.
Added: But it is relevant that this isn’t normal today.
My best take on the thing is that, historically, most great physics discoveries were made by generalist, wide-branching natural philosophers. Granted, “natural philosophy” is arguably the direct ancestor of physics from which spawned the bastards of “chemistry” and “biology”, but even regardless, the key point is that they were generalists and that, if we were going to solve the current problem simply by throwing more specialized physicists and gamma ray guns at it, this is not the evidence I’d expect to see.
Given historical base rates of generalists vs specialists in physics, and the ratio of Great Discoveries made by the former rather than the latter, it feels as if generalists have a net advantage in “consolidating” recent research into a Great Discovery.
I do have to agree, though, that all of them came from physicists, if not necessarily formally trained, although in most cases they were. Good knowledge of physics is necessary, that I won’t argue. But what I’ll point out is that I’ve personally met many more game developers and programmers with a much better grasp of (basic) physics (i.e. first volume of Feynman’s Lectures) than college physics department members, on a purely absolute count. It doesn’t seem that far-fetched, to me, to assume there’s a comparable difference in base rates of people within and outside physics departments with a solid enough grasp of physics for the Next Great Discovery, whatever that threshold may be (and obviously, the lower the actual threshold, the more likely it is that it will come from outside Physics Departments).
I am hard pressed to think of any significant discovery in the last 100 years or so which was not made by specialists (granted, often with a wide view of things). I’m sure there are some, but likely only a tiny fraction. If you look through the list of Nobel laureates in Physics, Chemistry and Biology, do you find any “generalists” there? Or, assuming the Nobel committee is biased toward the establishment, inspired by “generalists”?
To expand on shminux’s point about what has happened in the last 100 years that’s different: There’s a serious lack of low-hanging fruit. Ideas are more complicated and the simple ideas that a generalist has any chance to find have to a large extent already been discovered. Note also that in fact it is well before 100 years ago that this trend already started. Darwin, Maxwell, Faraday and many other 19th century researchers were already specialists by most notions of the term. So really this trend has been going on for almost 200 years.