Editing Mansfield Amendment (1969) (section)

== Where Did the Top Physicists Actually Go? ==

Physicists did not retire or die en masse following the Mansfield Amendment. Many went to Wall Street, starting in the late 1970s and exploding in the 1980s. Fischer Black (Black-Scholes) hired physicists in the 1970s; Jim Simons founded Renaissance Technologies in 1982 explicitly to hire pure physicists and mathematicians who could no longer get academic funding. By the 1990s, quantitative finance was draining elite talent that previously would have gone into fundamental theory.
Others went into classified programs — or simply stopped publishing in the open. The timing is too precise to be pure coincidence: the gravity/propulsion community (Witten père, DeWitt, Weber, Forward, etc.) vanishes from public view right as Mansfield.