Food, housing, and health insurance will allow these qualified theorists to independently pursue their work. If you're smart enough to continually pass such an exam, why should someone else tell you what to work on? Such qualified scientists should not have to convince others to fund their work. They can then pursue risky projects, worry more about quality of papers than about quantity, etc. There simply aren't enough conventional academic positions to go around today in physics, and the result is a glut of life-long postdocs. They want to continue pursuing pure science but after moving so many times to work on not-so-independent projects, they're ultimately forced into engineering. The next big revolution (I'm not talking about iphones) will be from pure science, not engineering.
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