a different Nobel theory

A reader writes:

“You might be interested in Richard Hamming’s suggestion (based on his
experience at Bell Labs) that the problem is exactly the opposite, that
this kind of recognition resulted in people only wanting to spend time
working on ‘great problems’, and miss out on smaller problems that might
develop. There’s a copy of Hamming’s talk on this at
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html.”

I won’t have time to check the link for a little while, but Einstein comes to mind as a possible illustration for this. Once you’ve already done as much as Einstein did in 1905 and then general relativity, you’re probably not going to want to play pitty-pat with tiny scientific puzzles. You’re going to want to shoot for the moon. (Of course, I doubt the Nobel Prize itself has much to do with that in Einstein’s case. In a sense Einstein was one of those people who was much bigger than the prize, and knew it.)