John Gillaspy @NSF: We use the textbook test. If your research is wildly successful, will it be in textbooks 20 years from now? #aqsw2019pic.twitter.com/Vj7xFhhfsz
Sounds like a terrible approach, TBH. AFAICT most of the main things described in my book with Ike were serendipitous discoveries, not the result of planned grants. Indeed, almost none came out of problem-oriented grants at all.
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Deutsch & Feynman's papers. Shor '94. Teleportation. Quantum crypto. Reversible computing. Quantum noiseless coding. Even error-correction, AFAIK. AFAIK the most important papers in each case were unfunded, or funded by non-project based fellowship type funding.
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In 2006 I wrote a list of my 10 favourite papers in quantum information. I then looked for patterns in them, just for fun. The two patterns that stood out: _none_ was funded by a project-based grant; and none of the principal authors except Feynman was a prof at a research U.
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This utterly shocked me. At the time I was a prof at a research U with multiple project-based grants. Reflecting on this was a big part of why I left the field and academia. I think the approach taken by NSF and other agencies leads to minor, incremental work.
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(There are exceptions, e.g., they deserve a world of credit for LIGO. But in general I think their practices need to be redesigned from scratch.)
End of conversation
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This is brilliant observation and fits perfectly withhttps://www.technologyreview.com/s/531911/isaac-asimov-asks-how-do-people-get-new-ideas/ …
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