DW - "Great Opportunity" For Max Planck Institut As Applications From US Scientists Spike 2-300%

[NNadir]

2. There is great irony in this, given what took place in Germany in the 1930s.

German science was pretty much at a pinnacle in the world before Hitler came to power. In the 1930s the brain drain - many leading scientists were Jewish or descended from Jews - left Germany bereft of its scientific dominance, in effect transferring it to the United States.

A very sad case was that of David Hilbert, one of the finest mathematicians ever to have lived. When he died in 1943, only ten people attended his funeral. The world's greatest minds, who should have been there, had almost all left Germany.

A equally bad case was that of Max Planck, who tried, unsuccessfully, to stem the bleeding of German science. His son Erwin was executed for participation in a plot against Hitler in 1944. All of his papers, invaluable as they may have been for the history of science, were destroyed in a bombing raid.

German science never really recovered its former prominence, although when I was a kid Chemistry students were still expected to learn German.

Science is not a spigot you turn on and off. My own son, now a Ph.D. student, is trying to plan emigration, which I encourage. If he gets out of the country, I don't think he'll be coming back.

America, for so long a scientific powerhouse unprecedented in world history, will become a scientific backwater. Future science students will be told to learn Chinese or French or perhaps even German.

This post is an expanded paraphrase of an earlier post in this thread that I accidentally deleted while trying to edit it.