David Deutsch: Einstein Would Fail Modern Grant Applications
Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal
Curt Jaimungal
4.6 • 606 Ratings
🗓️ 6 October 2025
⏱️ 133 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Why would Einstein fail a modern grant application? |
| 0:04.7 | Fortunately, I'm not very familiar with the way that grant applications are dealt with. |
| 0:13.4 | I only know the gross features in both senses of the word gross. |
| 0:34.3 | That is where I noticed that grants that should have been awarded aren't fairly reliably when it comes to fundamental research, which is what I'm mainly interested in. |
| 0:41.3 | So, judging by my experience, and I certainly don't know what it was like what it was like over 100 years ago in Germany, but judging by my experience today in Britain and in America, he wouldn't have stood a very good chance |
| 1:00.0 | because he wouldn't have been able to say what the application, well, first of all, he wouldn't have been able to say very clearly what he was trying to do, |
| 1:14.3 | because there was no one versed in relativity on the panel that judged physics applications. |
| 1:25.9 | So none of them would have known what a manifold is, what the |
| 1:31.1 | Riemann tensor is. So his application would have had to explain that in very elementary terms, |
| 1:40.2 | and they would have had in front of them a pile of applications, |
| 1:45.9 | which from their point of view had much more merit |
| 1:50.4 | because they could see that these were open research problems |
| 1:54.8 | that needed to be solved, |
| 1:57.1 | only in the bigger picture they were incremental, whereas Einstein's was fundamental. |
| 2:08.0 | So I think he would have had difficulty getting a grant, and I think in historical fact, he did have |
| 2:15.3 | such difficulty. It was only when Max Planck saw that there was something |
| 2:23.2 | interesting about him, that he got him a job. And again, that isn't possible nowadays, |
| 2:30.3 | because there'd be anti-nepotism rules, there'd be rules about the procedure, |
| 2:38.0 | and every procedural rule is an impediment to any new kind of thing being tried. |
| 2:49.3 | Anti-nepotism sounds positive. |
| 2:52.4 | What's the negative side to it? |
| 3:01.4 | Well, so nepotism, literally, if it means not giving a job to your nephew, then perhaps that has merit. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Curt Jaimungal, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Curt Jaimungal and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.