Collective Conscience

Why does everyone know abut Albert Einstein, but not too many people know about John Bardeen? Bardeen was the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in the same field, shouldn't he be just as famous as Einstein? I think it has to do with the limitations on the world's "collective conscience." There is only so much material that can be told to everyone (or at least let's say 90 to 95 percent of the world--or maybe just the US). Someone--or a group of people--in the media decide what gets put on the front pages of the major newspapers and what gets reported during the first several minutes of a news broadcast. There is only so much material that can fit there. My guess is that there are about five or six stories that get rehashed over and over. Every news outlet tells pretty much the same ones. Or if they don't tell all the same stories, then it's only the stories that do overlap that reach the 95% majority of the world (or national) audience. So there is only room for a certain number of people to make the really big news that makes them famous. And to be really famous you need to make the news many times. There's even less room for the "many-timers". Or put another way, if someone gets reported on many times, then there is someone else that is not getting reported on.

For example, Barack Obama. He's probably the most famous person in the world right now. We heard about him all during the campaign and now we still hear all about him--perhaps more. He is definitely in the collective conscience. Everyone knows who he is. But how many people do we not know about, or how many inportant events did not reach the collective conscience because we were hearing instead about Barack's ice cream choice on his family's Father's Day outing?

Sports give several examples. Lance Armstrong? Everyone knows about him. He made the news so many times with seven Tour de France victories. Now whenever anyone talks about the Tour de France, they mention Lance. We have Floyd Landis, too, who made the news because of drug-use accusations. I'd say he's in the collective conscience, or was. Perhaps now, a year or more later, he's falling out of it. There is only so much room in the "cycling" collective conscience and if you don't keep making headlines, you're out.

Tennis? Andre Agassi. Pete Sampras. Roger Federer. I could think of a few others, but that's about it.

Nobel laureates? Einstein. Fermi. For literature: Hemingway, Steinbeck. I just browsed through the Nobel laureate list and, of course, I don't know 90% of them. These are the people whose contributions to the world were deemed so awesome that they earned the biggest prize known. But there is only so much room in the collective conscience even for Nobel laureates. Indeed, instead of knowing about Martti Ahtisaar, the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize winner, there is only enough room in the collective conscience for Brittany Spears (or is she dropping out now, too?).

So how does this relate to research? There are certain things that everybody knows. The challenge is to go beyond that and find the interesting things that nobody is yet talking about. And if you can find out things that will enter the collective conscience, then your work has the most impact.

But on the other hand, we should realize that there is much, much more of importance in this life than what everybody knows about. That collection of information is so small that if we're only focussed on it, we're really missing out.