
All Roads Lead from Prague - Hooke
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2020/06/13/all-roads-lead-from-prague/
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abrowne
The subhead: _A new book by Michael Gordin shows how 16 months in Prague
formed a young Albert Einstein—and the shape of science, politics, and
intellectual history to come._

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rb808
What I dont understand is that so many of the world's great intellectuals
lived in beautiful cities and towns. University towns often are really pretty
with quaint buildings both in Europe and the East Coast.

Then how did SV manage to do well? Butt ugly warehouses and suburban office
buildings.

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dhosek
Other than Stanford, I don't think that SV really has educational institutions
as its driving force.

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Elof
A lot of amazing research and startups come out of UC Berkeley, and while they
are on the fringe of the Bay Area and arguably outside of it UC Santa Cruz and
UC Davis do very interesting research in bio chemistry and materials

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dhosek
I wouldn't consider Santa Cruz to be part of SV and definitely not Davis.
There are plenty of significant educational institutions in the Bay Area and
even more if you expand the net to Northern California, but SV's prominence is
driven more by the location there of early tech companies than any educational
drivers outside of Stanford (although Stanford is very important).

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Elof
I disagree, I think education is one of the foundational pieces of what
created SV and helps maintain is tech ecosystem. There was something that got
those early tech companies to be here in the first place and I don't think it
was just luck.

My opinion is that there are 3 main drivers and that top tier education is one
of the most important ones.

They go like this:

Higher education that has enough gravity to aggregates diverse 'cutting edge'
people from a variety of pursuits.

A reason for those smart people to stay that isn't just money. I think that's
lifestyle and access to nature. You have the ocean, mountains, wine country,
and relatively good weather.

The last is capital, I think saying companies is putting the cart before the
horse. When I say capital I don't just mean startup capital. The ecosystem has
to also have liquidity. There are lots of areas that have one of the 3, but
very few that have all of them.

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tia4tia
German University of Prague.

If you can read German or know how to use Google translate
[https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Universit%C3%A4t_Pr...](https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Universit%C3%A4t_Prag)

Insigniestreit.... Czechoslovakia, "victim" of ww2...

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kvgr
What is the meaning of this comment and "victim"? Was not Czechoslovakia
victim of Nazis?

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tia4tia
If you translate from the German wiki and from the history of this German
University in Prague before ww2, the "raid" might not have been so random,
greedy and unjustified as history books might want you to believe. But such
comments are not welcome on HK

