Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

jump ahead of the line and get an H1B visa. This has continually replenished our scientific ranks. Silicon Valley, for example, is roughly 50 percent foreign born, many coming from Taiwan and India. Nationwide, 50 percent of all Ph.D. students in physics are foreign born. At my university, the City University of New York, the figure is closer to 100 percent foreign born.
    Some congressmen have tried to eliminate the H1B visa because, they claim, it takes jobs away from Americans, but they do not understand the true role that this visa plays. Usually, there are no Americans qualified to take the highest-level jobs in Silicon Valley, which we’ve seen often go unfilled as a consequence. This fact was apparent when former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder tried to pass a similar H1B visa immigration law for Germany, but the measure was defeated by those who claimed that this would take jobs away from native-born Germans. Again, the critics failed to understand that there are often no Germans to fill these high-level jobs, which then go unfilled. These H1B immigrants do not take away jobs, they create entire new industries.
    But the H1B visa is only a stopgap measure. The United States cannot continue to live off foreign scientists, many of whom are beginning to return to China and India as their economies improve. So the brain drainis not sustainable. This means that the United States will eventually have to overhaul its archaic, sclerotic education system. At present, poorly prepared high school students flood the job market and universities, creating a logjam. Employers continually bemoan the fact that they have to take one year to train their new hires to bring them up to speed. And the universities are burdened by having to create new layers of remedial courses to compensate for the poor high school education system.
    Fortunately, our universities and businesses eventually do a commendable job of repairing the damage done by the high school system, but this is a waste of time and talent. For the United States to remain competitive into the future, there have to be fundamental changes in the elementary and high school system.
    To be fair, the United States still has significant advantages. I was once at a cocktail party at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and met a biotech entrepreneur from Belgium. I asked him why he left, given that Belgium has its own vigorous biotech industry. He said that in Europe, often you don’t get a second chance. Since people know who you and your family are, if you make a mistake, you could be finished. Your mistakes tend to follow you, no matter where you are. But in the United States, he said, you can constantly reinvent yourself. People don’t care who your ancestors were. They just care what you can do for them now, today. This was refreshing, he said, and one reason why other European scientists move to the United States.
    LESSON OF SINGAPORE
    In the West, there is the expression “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” But in the East, there is another expression: “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” These two expressions are diametrically opposed to each other, but they capture some of the essential features of Western and Eastern thought.
    In Asia, the students often have test scores that soar beyond those of their counterparts in the West. However, much of that learning is book learning and rote memorization, which will take you only to a certain level. To reach the higher levels of science and technology, you need creativity, imagination, and innovation, which the Eastern system does not nurture.So although China may eventually catch up with the West when it comes to producing cheap factory-made copies of goods first manufactured in the West, it will lag for decades behind the West in the creative process of dreaming up new products and new strategies.
    I once spoke at a conference in Saudi Arabia, where another featured speaker was Lee Kuan Yew, prime minister of Singapore from 1959 to 1990. He is something of a rock star among the developing nations, since he helped to forge the modern nation of Singapore, which ranks among the top nations in science. Singapore, in fact, is the fifth-richest nation in the world, if you calculate the per capita gross domestic product. The audience strained to hear every word from this legendary figure.
    He reminisced about the early days after the war, when Singapore was viewed as a backwater port known primarily