Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 — That’s the new book by theoretical physicist, best-selling author, and unabashed popularizer of science Michio Kaku. And, here’s one prediction he makes. The U.S. won’t play as prominent a role in science during the years ahead. The reason why he explains in The Wall Street Journal.
Fifty percent of Ph.D. physicists are foreign-born, and they’re here compliments of the H1-B visa. There’s a brain drain into the United States; that’s why we’re still No. 1. But it can’t last forever.
And indeed while China and India start to lure their best talent home, the best American students are leaving the hard sciences for lucrative careers, such as investment banking. Kaku goes on to say:
I have nothing against investment banking, but it’s like massaging money rather than creating money. If you’re in physics, you create inventions, you create lasers, you create transistors, computers, GPS. [If you’re an investment banker, on the other hand] you don’t create anything new. You simply massage other people’s money and take a cut.
More Culture Around the Web:
Paul Graham’s Ambitious Startups Ideas: #3 Replace Universities
World’s Oldest Charles Dickens Film Discovered
How To Be Creative. Jonah Lehrer on Why Anyone Can Innovate
Josef Skvorecky on the Nazis’ Control-Freak Hatred of Jazz
Author Neil Gaiman Talks about His Trusted Fountain Pens
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Senate Testimony from this Week on the Past, Present, & Future of NASA
Beat poet Allen Ginsberg Interviewed by Conservative Columnist John Lofton, 1990
Google Begins to Scale Back Its Scanning of Books From University Libraries
Introducing The Curator’s Code: A Standard for Honoring Attribution of Discovery Across the Web
The Day the World Took Off. Cambridge Documentary on the Origins of the Industrial Revolution
Leave a Reply