Jeff Leek, at the Bloomberg School of Public Health (Johns Hopkins U), writes the Simply Statistics blog, at which he noted today the tyranny of the idea in science.
In business, he says, startup ideas are a dime a dozen and only winners are rewarded. In science, startup ideas are rewarded, and the people who made them matter are forgotten. He gives, as an example,
Higgs Boson – Peter Higgs postulated the Boson in 1964, he won the Nobel Prize in 2013 for that prediction, in between tons of people did follow on work, someone convinced Europe to build one of the most expensive pieces of scientific equipment ever built and conservatively thousands of scientists and engineers had to do a ton of work to get the equipment to (a) work and (b) confirm the prediction.
Who remembers those people? Whereas, win or lose, it’ll always be the Higgs boson.
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