Carver Mead: ‘A bunch of big egos’ are strangling science

The scientific revolution has stalled, here’s how to kickstart it
February 22, 2013
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(Credit: Dick Lyon/Wikimedia Commons)

ISSCC Microelectronics pioneer, Caltech professor emeritus, and all-around smart guy Carver Mead believes that the scientific revolution that began with the discovery of special relativity and quantum mechanics has stalled, and that it’s up to us to kickstart it, The Register reports.

“A bunch of big egos got in the way,” he told his audience of 3,000-plus chipheads at the International Soild-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco on Monday.

Much more work needs to be done to restart that revolution, Mead said, with the goal of explaining in an intuitive way how all matter in the universe relates to and affects all other matter, and how to explore those interrelationships in a way that isn’t “buried in enormous piles of obscure mathematics.”

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