Victerius

Who are our modern J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, John Von Neumann, and Stanislaw Ulam?

Sorry, but I think it's you who are out of touch here.

Requiring 15-20 years of experience?

Just... no.

Software engineers are so well paid that many of them retire from the job market permanently after 15-20 years. You might as well ask people to be 65 years old until they can occupy the position.

20 years is 25% of a lifespan, and 33% of an adult lifespan.

Why isn't 10 years good enough? Unless it's an executive position for people who are at the end of their careers. You can become a Brigadier General in 20 years in the military, which would be broadly equivalent to a SVP.

> Once you are at the stage of looking for tenured faculty jobs, your publication record is everything

If a university thinks a PhD student's publication record is good enough to grant him or her a doctorate, it should be good enough to offer him a faculty position.

I don't understand your sentence.

With the news stories about overseas Chinese police stations, I wonder why they didn't go after him directly in Italy. Maybe they lacked his home address. But that could be obtained by a cyber infiltration of the Italian government or through old school espionage.

> Also, politicians and other important public figures don't use Reddit like they use Twitter

I think that may change in the future. Many politicians, including prominent ones, have done AMAs. Arnold Schwarzenegger is a semi regular. The Sergeant Major of the US Army is a regular. Rick Astley is a semi regular. Verne Troyer was a regular before he died.

I don't mind having to conform to some norms. I would even go so far as to argue that close-knit communities are impossible to maintain over long time horizons without these gatekeeping attitudes and insider values that outsiders must conform to.

Your comment reminds me of a line by Boromir (Sean Bean) in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

"It is a strange fate we should suffer so much fear and doubt… over so small a thing. Such a little thing."

Where the little thing here is the transistor.

I wish society in general worked like this: less formality, more informality, more relationships.....

.... I could move to a small town. I've always lived in a large metropolis and, to be frank, I'm tired of it. I can't move to Monaco, or make the global population decrease by 90%, but I could move to a smaller community in my state. I think this is what I need to start building more relationships with other people.

Impressive.

Now do it without using a computer, the old fashioned way, with books, paper maps, star charts, slide rulers, sextants, compasses, and pens. I'm sure some people would be able to.

I didn't know Prof. Wien had a HN account.

Let's have some fun. Here's a basic special relativity problem from John R. Taylor's Classical Mechanics.

A space explorer A sets off at a steady 0.95c to a distant star. After exploring the star for a short time, he returns at the same speed and gets home after a total absence of 80 years (as measured by earth-bound observers.) How long do A's clocks say that he was gone, and by how much has he aged as compared to his twin B who stayed behind on earth? [Note: This is the famous "twin paradox." It is fairly easy to get the right answer by judicious insertion of a factor of γ in the right place, but to understand it, you need to recognize that it involves three inertial frames: the earth-bound frame S, the frame S' of the outbound rocket, and the frame S'' of the returning rocket. Write down the time dilation formula for the two halves of the journey and then add. Notice that the experiment is not symmetrical between the two twins: B stays at rest in the single inertial frame S, but A occupies at least two different frames. This is what allows the result to be unsymmetrical.]