MAX PLANCK, the inventor of quantum theory, once said that science advances one funeral at a time. He meant—or, at least, is presumed to have meant—that the death of a dominant mind in a field liberates others with different points of view to make their cases more freely, without treading on the toes of established authority. It might also rearrange patterns of funding, for they, too, often reflect established hierarchies.
But was Planck right? For almost a decade Pierre Azoulay of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been trying to find out. His conclusion, reported in a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, is a qualified “yes”.
Dr Azoulay first published on the subject in 2010 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. On that occasion he came to an apparently different conclusion. This was that the death of a star resulted in a marked slowing of the published output of the star’s collaborators, a phenomenon which sometimes lasted for...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/25n3gqI
EmoticonEmoticon