Paintings as important as Las Meninas or the Mona Lisa? Why are there no more discoveries that rewrite textbooks, like the Theory of Gravity or Thermodynamics? Dozens of thinkers complain that there are no more geniuses. The most illustrious philosophers were Greek.
And they are ancient! Socrates taught Plato; Plato taught Aristotle; Aristotle went on to teach Alexander the Great, who would create the biggest empire the world had ever known. Jews likely compiled the sacred Torah around that time, and Zoroastrianism was at its apogee. But civilization had been growing for millennia after the development of agriculture.
Why did so many religions emerge at the same time? And why no golden ages of religions since? Cervantes died on April 22, What are the odds that people had been writing for millennia, and would go on writing for centuries more, but the most important authors of two of the most spoken languages wrote their most important works at exactly the same time?
Why such a Golden Age? Why was it never replicated? Which French authors are at their level today? In the last 30 years? From to , we increased the number of researchers 30x. But the annual growth rate of the economy is the same or lower. We can see the same relationship in healthcare.
From the paper that published this data :. All this can be crystallized by this :. Say that Beethoven was the greatest musician of all time. In brief, where's today's Beethoven? Where's today's Darwin for life sciences , Ramanujan for mathematics , Shakespeare for literature , etc.? On a per-dollar or per-person basis, this suggests that science is becoming far less efficient. Where are our geniuses? In absolute terms, we probably have more individually tutored students than we used to. If individual tutoring were the magical ingredient, Azerbaijanis would win Nobel Prize after Nobel Prize.
