How Many Einstein-Level Scientists Had Ever Lived?

Today there are over 8 billion people alive but a century ago there were only 2 billion people alive. Given a probability distribution of innate human intelligence with a sharply declining tail at high values, one would expect there to be four times more Einstein-level scientists today than a century ago. In fact, there should be scientists even more talented than Albert Einstein because the tail of the distribution should be sampled to higher intelligence levels within a larger population.

This is not the impression one gets when gauging in a historical perspective the accomplishments of the scientific community in academia today, despite its larger size.

In particular, path breaking discoveries in physics are rarer than they used to be a century ago, and physics Nobel prizes are routinely awarded to confirmations of old ideas based on well-established traditions. Why are disruptive breakthroughs like Special and General Relativity, quantum mechanics or the discovery of new particles and interactions so rare today despite the increased number of scientists?

Are there fewer puzzles left for us to explore? Not really. There is actually an increasing number of unsolved fundamental problems that are recognized today. For example, we do not know what 95% of the Universe is composed of — constituting dark matter and dark energy, what preceded the Big Bang, what lies inside a black hole or what forms of life or intelligence may exist beyond our planet Earth.

And these are only the known unknowns, namely fundamental questions which we recognize as unresolved. But there might be many more unknown unknowns. And some of these unknown unknowns might be more disruptive to our perception of physical reality than quantum mechanics was a century ago.

To illustrate how unexpected are scientific disruptions, consider the following historical anecdote. The physicist Albert Michelson said in a 1894 speech at the dedication of Ryerson Laboratory of the University of Chicago: “The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote…. Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.” This was said just one decade before Special Relativity, two decades before General Relativity and three decades before quantum Mechanics, all revolutionizing our perception of physical reality.

The rarity of disruptive discoveries today is even more surprising given the increased allocation of funding to fundamental science relative to a century ago.

How can we understand the hiatus in disruptive discoveries in physics? Is it because all the low-hanging fruit was already picked up?

Perhaps, in part. But in my view, there is another contributing factor. The simple-minded number count of scientists assumes that individuals are independent of each other. But in reality, scientists interact strongly and so their behaviors could be tightly correlated for psychological reasons. In the era of social media, the drive to be liked leads to groupthink.

Groupthink dominates the sociology of science more today than it did a century ago as a result of the increase in the number of scientists. As communities grow larger, fewer individuals dare to deviate from the beaten path and think outside the box because of the negative repercussions that pushback might bring to their careers. Selection committees for research funding or promotions tend to follow prevailing dogmas and avoid risks. The reputation of out-of-the-box thinkers is often challenged by coordinated teams of social-media zealots. The psychological pressure grew stronger in larger groups, and routinely led to thought police as advocates of echo chambers argued for traditional thinking.

How can groupthink be mitigated?

One remedy is to reward innovative ideas from individuals or small groups. Funding and prestige should benefit those who make progress by thinking differently than the herd. The change could also be cultivated through choices made at the personal level. In 2010, I wrote an opinion essay in Nature magazine — available here, in which I advocated for diversifying the portfolio of scientific research by hedging risk similarly to financial investments — where 20% may go to venture capital, 30% to stocks and 50% to bonds.

At the community level, a higher status should be given to excellence through objective measures, rooted in experimental verification rather than in popularity based on traditional thinking.

Since evidence-based excellence is not biased by status, this approach would naturally benefit young minds who are not bound to conventional thinking.

Let me close by illustrating my recommendations through a timely example. When an interstellar object like 3I/ATLAS shows anomalies (as listed here), the scientific community should embrace the opportunity to learn something new. Studying the nature of interstellar objects would allow us to gather new knowledge about what lies outside the solar system. A message in a bottle from interstellar space offers an opportunity to learn as long as we are willing to remain curious and humble enough to acknowledge what we do not know.

The most intriguing question is not how many Einstein-level scientists live today on Earth but rather how many of them had lived on exoplanets over the past 13.8 billion years? If we ever encounter them, we might be able to learn from them about unknown unknowns that even the most intelligent earthlings had never imagined before.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.