I don’t know about Heisenberg, but a common answer for Einstein is the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, which took the best minds of the day, and freed them from practical concerns about justifying their research interests or talking to outside researchers, apparently causing them to be increasingly less productive & out of touch from the rest of their respective fields.
From Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman
When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don’t get an idea for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they’re not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.
Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!
When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore?
The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn’t the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren’t good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards.
But let me say why age seems to have the effect it does. In the first place if you do some good work you will find yourself on all kinds of committees and unable to do any more work. You may find yourself as I saw Brattain when he got a Nobel Prize. The day the prize was announced we all assembled in Arnold Auditorium; all 3 winners [Shockley, Bardeen, & Brattain] got up and made speeches. The third one, Brattain, practically with tears in his eyes, said, “I know about this Nobel-Prize effect and I am not going to let it affect me; I am going to remain good old Walter Brattain.” Well, I said to myself, “That is nice.” But in a few weeks I saw it was affecting him. Now he could only work on great problems.
and he attributes the decline in Shannon’s career to a similar effect from getting tenure & a blank check from MIT
Shannon, I believe, ruined himself. In fact when he left Bell Labs [for MIT, which offered him tenure + a blank check], I said, “That’s the end of Shannon’s scientific career.” I received a lot of flak from my friends who said that Shannon was just as smart as ever. I said, “Yes, he’ll be just as smart, but that’s the end of his scientific career”, and I truly believe it was.
Of course, as we see above, he also attributes Shannon’s decline to not being willing to work on smaller problems. These two problems could exacerbate each other, so they’re not entirely incompatible.
That might explain why Einstein wasn’t very productive in his last decades, but his opposition to the uncertainty principle etc. predates his tenure at the IAS. Maybe he would’ve come around had he been in a more productive setting? I kind of doubt it—it seems to have been a pretty deep-seated, philosophical disagreement—but who knows.
Heisenberg spent his later career as head of the Max Planck Institute. I can’t imagine many scientists enjoy administrative duties, but he does seem to have had more contact with the rest of the scientific world than Einstein did.
I don’t know about Heisenberg, but a common answer for Einstein is the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, which took the best minds of the day, and freed them from practical concerns about justifying their research interests or talking to outside researchers, apparently causing them to be increasingly less productive & out of touch from the rest of their respective fields.
From Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman
Hamming also writes about the IAS
And notes a similar effect of nobel prizes on academics’ work
and he attributes the decline in Shannon’s career to a similar effect from getting tenure & a blank check from MIT
Of course, as we see above, he also attributes Shannon’s decline to not being willing to work on smaller problems. These two problems could exacerbate each other, so they’re not entirely incompatible.
That might explain why Einstein wasn’t very productive in his last decades, but his opposition to the uncertainty principle etc. predates his tenure at the IAS. Maybe he would’ve come around had he been in a more productive setting? I kind of doubt it—it seems to have been a pretty deep-seated, philosophical disagreement—but who knows.
Heisenberg spent his later career as head of the Max Planck Institute. I can’t imagine many scientists enjoy administrative duties, but he does seem to have had more contact with the rest of the scientific world than Einstein did.