Ebook: Promoting the Planck Club: How Defiant Youth, Irreverent Researchers and Liberated Universities Can Foster Prosperity Indefinitely

"Promoting the Planck Club" presents rich mini histories of selected scientists whose work led to radical and transformational discoveries, their background, the prevailing scientific environment, and the conditions that allowed for their success. The text provides a broad audience of students, scientists, engineers, economists, and policymakers with ways to ensure that we take all steps to protect the flow of unpredictable scientific discoveries that are necessary for sustained levels of growth as well as ways to ensure that all steps are taken to protect the flow of unpredictable scientific discoveries.

"In this provocative book, Donald Braben presents compelling data, cogent analysis, and vivid historical episodes tracing the immense economic and social impact of frontier scientific research. He focuses on revolutionary discoveries that emerged from decidedly unorthodox “outlier” work of a relatively few scientists. Those pioneers he designates as the “Planck Club.” The name is apt: Max Planck, when early in the twentieth century, confronted with experimental results inexplicable by well-established physics, reluctantly advanced an iconoclastic idea. After gestation for more than two decades, his idea gave birth to quantum mechanics, which profoundly transformed understanding of the nature of light and matter and produced a myriad of technologies.
As in two sibling studies published by Wiley (Braben 2004 and 2008), Braben himself has emulated Planck. Armed with strong evidence, Braben has forthrightly challenged the now well-established and pervasive procedures for assessing and granting support for scientific research. These policies, based on “peer review” (actually, “preview” as Braben emphasizes) have evolved over decades. Well-intended, but in many respects deeply flawed, the procedures imposed have increasingly dire consequences."
--Dudley Herschbach