In the summer of 2008, the journal Nature published a short,
illuminating essay that tracked the global migration of
scientific research over the centuries, as empires rose and
fell. The center of world science, for instance, was in France
in 1740, before it moved to Germany, then Britain, and, later,
America, carrying with it, in each case, a major dimension of
global leadership. The authors—J. Rogers Hollingsworth, Karl H.
Müller and Ellen Jane Hollingsworth—have concluded that another
scientific superpower is unlikely to emerge with the same
dominance as its predecessors. They have also discovered that
great shifts in global scientific leadership follow a clear
pattern: “Each former scientific power, especially during the
initial stages of decline, had the illusion that its system was
performing better than it was, overestimating its strength and
underestimating innovation elsewhere. The elite could not
imagine that the centre would shift.” American policymakers have
begun to notice the relative decline of