Book Review: Scientific Freedom: The Elixir of Civilization

20 January 2026

It's been 2+ months since I actually completed this book: it was Stripe Press #5, behind Where is my Flying Car, The Big Score, The Making of PoP, and Pieces of the Action. Since then, I've stacked on 6 more, and have fallen quite behind on this whole book review thing! Which certainly doesn't help the quality of the review.

Seemingly short at first, this was actually a bit of a fight to get through. Braben is a scientist-turned-advisor, and the last, huge chapter of the book is devoted to the funded projects in their due technical detail. Like many Stripe Press books, if one was tight on time, they could read the post-first-publication intro and the first chapter to get the gist.

This book falls in to the "What happened in 1970?" (Great Stagnation) cateegory of Stripe Press books. Braben's explanation is simple: instead of letting unmolested, ambitious geniuses pursue new science to their heart's desire for decades at a time ("transformative" or "venture" science), we instead saddle them with bureaucratic bloat: writing grants, passing the in-group-ification via peer review, surviving yet another year of their most scientifically fertile years to reach tenure with incrimental results. The evidence for this is similar to the idea of "failure of imagination" from Hall: we do not know *how* or *where* the next transformative, century-defining scientific breakthrough will come from, so why do we require a grant application where we ask for just such a thing, and then are surprised when instead get incremental progress in an area that is already "mined out"?

I enjoyed the wizard-parable poster: in the year 1900, a wizard visits the scientific leaders of the world, shows them the coming century's discoveries, which are totally different from what they expected (continuations of 19th century tech). The leaders ask what they must do to bring this to pass, and the wizard says "nothing: just give your scientists unconstrained freedom". That is the pitch of the whole book.

Braben enumerates a "Planck club": nobel winners who transformed their field, usually by being given total freedom for decades at a time. His goal is to add members to the Planck Club in the 21st century (all current members are from before 1970 or so, when the well-meaning bureaucrats took over).

Braben lays out his vision for how funding agencies, universities, grants, advisors, etc. would work in this return to the old paradigm. He himself walked the walk: running a wildly successful venture research program at BP for 12 years, from 1980 to 1992.

On to the summary.

Summary

• Introduction to New Edition: The new introduction, from Braben in 2020, is mostly a summary of the book. It also reflects and tries to understand why more venture science efforts haven't come to pass, concluding, basically, Hall's "failure of Nerve" is the culprit.
• Introduction: discussion of how the transformative scientific discoveries of the 20th century were entirely unexpected and came from scientists who had no restrictions on their freedom (but absolute trust and funding from their instituions). The wizard-poster analogy. Then the analogy of the Polynesian collapse: they deforested their island, seeking short-term gains and partly as tools to transport their massive Easter Island heads, destroying the ecosystem that supplied their food and lifestyle. This is analogized to a preference for incremental short-term scientific discoveries as opposed to far-seeing, more impactful transformative science (hence the cover of the book). Then a comparison to global warming and a summary of the rest of the book.
• Chapter 1: Braben introduces "The Damocles Zone", which argues that we are in a much more fragile position (as a civilization) than appears because of non-linear control systems that can throw us out of equilibrium, and the only way to get ahead of this is transformative science.
• Chapter 2: defines transformative resarch as research that has a good chance of "radically changing our understanding" or "creating new fields"; more discussion the "Planck Club"
• Chapter 3: discussion of how overmanagement of science has lead to bad outcomes. This includes fewer lone scientists, grants that expect a certain discovery to be defined in the proposal, shorter timelines, mandatory consensus through peer review, and more. Braben cites evidence, from increased science funding yet slower GDP growth, the reduction in new rather than incremental discoveries in Science's breakthroughs of the year. The OSRD, NSF, and Vannevar Bush make an appearance. The NSF and NIH routinely make palns and put out memos understanding the need to fund young scientists pursuing unclear yet transformative approaches, yet they never have the will to do so (bureaucratic failures, as well as "failures of nerve"?).
• Chapter 4: An outline of what a venture research program would look like: how much funding, how many grants, who to hire to work as assistants and advisors, etc. A part of this is a tale of how UK's "Research Councils" scuttled any good science in the UK around 1970.
• Chapter 5: how universities should change to better create transformative science. This starts with a history of how universities transitioned from elite, sparsely attended institutions, completely separate from the state and trusting their graduates, to ones with massive enrollment, paralyzed by rules and bureaucracy, and accountable to the state. He proposes a new kind of uinversity that is a small, elite, public-private partnership that has researchers rotate in as lecturers and students (sounds familiar to many "neo-schools" I've heard of). Also, this chapter had an interesting re-emergence of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the two non-Stripe Press progress books I've been meaning to read, along with The Rise and Fall of American Growth.
• Chapter 6: A description of how Braben set up his venture research program at BP, and how it was quite successful (yet ended due to politics).
• Chapter 7: A few page summary of all 26 funded proposals (funded and often renewed at 3-year increments), which Braben self-assesses (and backs up with citation counts and other financials) as 14 of them having transformative discoveries. Random aside: he's quite smitten by Edsger Dijkstra, who was a friend of the program and worked on a proposal related to verifiable software.

Now for takeaways.

• Braben loves a quote from Louis Pasteur that would reappear in other Stripe Press books: "Luck favors the prepared mind". This is of course rebutting the criticism that giving scientists all this funding with no direction or expectations is folly, when of course, the scientists do just fine unearthing ground-breaking discoveries.
• Theres a pretty strong understanding by Braben that the would-be scientific saviors are exceptional individuals, and that the vast majority of people simply don't have something to contribute in this domain. The membership in each centuries Planck Club measures in the dozens, that's just the way the cookie crumbles; but also, universities should have high standards and thus fewer pupils, and research teams composed of one or just a few members. Whether this is true, I think Braben mostly get's the power-law distribution correct, but I still believe less erudite individuals can contribute on other axes. This needs a longer discussion.

Overall, it was a worthy entry into the "What happened in 1970?" genre. There are so many examples and anecdotes that I didn't have time to give proper due, but one is left with an overwhelming feeling that we are doing scientific research wrong nowadays. However, is this the primary cause, a supporting cause, or merely a correlation of whatever went wrong in 1970? I'll report back more later.

It's also funny to write this review right after finishing another Stripe Press book, Scaling People, which felt like a monument to bureaucracy at times. More on that later...