“Planck Club” – a rubbish idea

UCL’s upper management likes to taut the idea of “Planck’s Club”. In the words of our Provost “Almost all the great scientific discoveries came unexpectedly from the work of a relatively few pioneering researchers such as Planck, Einstein, Avery, Townes, Crick and Watson, Huxley, Perutz, and perhaps 300 others of similar calibre – the “Planck Club” – whose discoveries usually won them Nobel Prizes or other prestigious awards. However, their modern successors are not as free, and constraints such as peer review in particular inhibit challenges to conventional wisdom.” (19 October 2009 e-mail newsletter to all staff)

This idea has recently been promoted as part of a wide ranging criticism about academic funding. Simply put, modern funding is too bureaurocratic, institutionalised, slow, and focused on tiny bits of routine science. It doesn’t encourage radical and out-of-the-box thinking.

The idea behind a “Planck’s Club” is based on lousy history (meaning, it’s false) and lousy problem formulation (meaning, it’s built on lousy premises). It also perpetuates dangerous biases (meaning, it stacks the deck in favour of certain things and against others). In the end, it’s simply pick-and-mix heritage in which big names are plucked from thin air and put to work by someone who wants justification for a position they already had.

I’m not saying the approach is wrong: benefactors should be able to offer money however they want to offer it. And I’m certainly not saying modern patronage by government agencies for science is the best organised it can be. But Provosts at top universities need to be smarter in their choice of words and not get sucked into somebody’s game of “I’m too good to be bound by your rules.”