[hermitShell]

It makes sense that fundamental advances have become more rare as our cumulative scientific progress grows bigger. In order to contribute something fundamentally new, people have to travel further / climb higher in order to see past what has already been done.

But US tech corps are probably not as free to pursue lines of thinking with no link to financial benefit. Academia is pretty broken. People are generally not free, they are economically bound to think about things more grounded in practical needs. The shackles of the almighty dollar.

So maybe more rare as a function of multiple reasons?

[ghaff]

Probably. My former employer had a pretty active research collaboration with a number of universities because they weren't that huge (especially at the time) and one professor in particular at a local university wanted the grounding of industry collaboration.

It's a balancing act. Many PhD students also care about working on stuff that real people actually care about.