In the summer of 2008, the journal Nature published a short, illuminating essay that tracked the global migration of scientific research over the centuries, as empires rose and fell. The center of world science, for instance, was in France in 1740, before it moved to Germany, then Britain, and, later, America, carrying with it, in each case, a major dimension of global leadership. The authors-J. Rogers Hollingsworth, Karl H. Müller and Ellen Jane Hollingsworth-have concluded that another scientific superpower is unlikely to emerge with the same dominance as its predecessors. They have also discovered that great shifts in global scientific leadership follow a clear pattern: ‘Each former scientific power, especially during the initial stages of decline, had the illusion that its system was performing better than it was, overestimating its strength and underestimating innovation elsewhere. The elite could not imagine that the centre would shift. American policymakers have begun to notice the relative decline of American strength in science and engineering. U.S. students currently rank twenty-first in science and twenty-fifth in math, near the bottom of the developed world, and the Obama Administration has launched a program called Educate to Innovate, which is designed to jumpstart improvements. Without being […]