And the 2042 Nobel Prize for Physics Goes to....

At the bottom of this post is a list of the 40 finalists in the 2012 Intel Science Talent Search. The competition is sponsored by Intel and Society for Science & the Public, the publisher of Science News. It was started in 1942 as the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. The purpose of the search is to find the scientists of the future:

The finalists “exemplify the promise of young people to bring creativity and innovation to bear to create a better world,” says Elizabeth Marincola, publisher of Science News and president of Society for Science & the Public, which has operated the Science Talent Search since 1942. “We applaud their hard work and creativity, and look forward to their continued contributions to human advancement.” 

The 40 students selected were winnowed from 300 semifinalists, who were chosen from a pool of 1,744 entrants. These math, engineering and science achievers join a select group of scientific luminaries: Past finalists have earned seven Nobel Prizes and four National Medals of Science. Physicist and Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow was a finalist in 1950; in 1980 Harvard University string theorist Lisa Randall was selected. Actress Natalie Portman was a semi-finalist in 1999.

If you examine the names carefully, you'll immediately notice a pattern: most of them are Asian. It's hard to determine actual ethnicity by names -- especially for blacks and American Indians, whose original family names were long ago stripped by slave owners or government edict. So some of the names I've identified as European may actually belong to people who consider themselves non-white. But by my rough estimate only six of the finalists are males of European descent. Five are females of European descent. The rest are mostly Chinese, Indian or other apparent Asian ethnicity.

Thirty or forty years ago, and certainly in 1942, nearly all these finalists would have been males of European descent. Though non-Hispanic whites still comprise 64% of the population of the United States, 73% of the 2012 STS finalists appear to be Asian, who comprise only 4.7% of the population.

This says something pretty dire about white American males: they're getting less education and they're less competitive at the higher levels. Where they used to dominate the fields of science and technology, they're barely keeping ahead of white girls, who have historically shunned math, science and engineering.

Not all these kids will become Nobel prize winners, but they will hold many of the high-paying jobs in medicine, science and technology. They will be the ones developing new medical treatments, new patents and new products. The next generation of technology will be designed by Asian Americans. That means they're going to starting new companies. And running them. And making lots of money.

When we think of the the high-tech nerds who made personal computers, the Internet and mobile computing revolution possible we think of white guys like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. (But, come to think of it, Steve Jobs was actually half Syrian, wasn't he?) Those days appear to be over.

As Charles Murray has noted, lower class whites are falling into the same trap that American blacks fell into decades ago. Conservatives like to blame government largesse, laziness and licentiousness. But we're all living in the same culture with the same access to government support, mind-numbing drugs, sex, sports, television and video games. Yet recent Asian immigrants -- who are almost certainly not very rich -- are able to ignore all that and still strive to work hard and get an education, while whites on the same rung of the economic ladder are falling behind. Why?

The culture of failure became ingrained in black America because no matter what they did, they were kept down. They weren't allowed to vote, get a decent education, hold good jobs or even sit at the same lunch counter as whites. How could anyone succeed in an environment where you're told every step of the way that you're inferior, or strung you up if you just looked at a white girl?

The culture of failure seems to have become ingrained in lower-class white America. Beginning with Henry Ford and the unionization of the work force, lower-class uneducated whites had opportunities to live well and their kids had the opportunity to move up the economic ladder. But for decades now those Americans have seen their lives fall apart. First it was steel mills to Japan, then automobile manufacturing to Japan and Mexico, then general manufacturing to China, then high-tech manufacturing to Asia. Unions have been essentially destroyed and real wages have been in decline for decades. We thought we'd be safe with the high-paying white-collar jobs in technology and finance, but with the rise of the Internet it has become trivial to outsource any job: engineering design, software development, medical imaging analysis, legal research, finance and on and on.

Two and three generations of lower-class white kids have now seen their dads sitting home with nothing to do after losing job after job to foreigners who make 31 cents an hour. How can anyone succeed in an environment where your family's entire life experience proves that no matter how many hours of overtime you put in, the bossman will take it away and give it to someone who's even more desperate than you are?

2011 Intel STS Finalists (listed by state, name, hometown and high school)

ARIZONA Scott Boisvert, Chandler, Basha High School

CALIFORNIA Amol Aggarwal, Saratoga, Saratoga High School;Xiaoyu Cao, San Diego, Torrey Pines High School; Bonnie Lei,Walnut, Walnut High School; Jonathan Li, Laguna Niguel, St. Margaret’s Episcopal School; Selena Li, Fair Oaks, Mira Loma High School; Andrew Liu, Palo Alto, Henry M. Gunn Senior High School;Rohan Mahajan, Cupertino, The Harker School; Evan O’Dorney,Danville,Venture School; Nikhil Parthasarathy, Mountain View, The Harker School; David Tang-Quan, Rancho Palos Verdes, Palos Verdes Peninsula High School; Chelsea Voss, Santa Clara, Cupertino High School

CONNECTICUT Jenny Liu, Orange, Amity Regional High School;Shubhro Saha, Avon, Choate Rosemary Hall

FLORIDA Eta Atolia, Tallahassee, Rickards High School; Elaine Zhou, Winter Park, Lake Highland Preparatory School

ILLINOIS Krystle Leung, Naperville, Naperville Central High School

MASSACHUSETTS Sung Won Cho, Lexington, Groton School

MICHIGAN Shubhangi Arora, Novi, Novi High School

MINNESOTA Prithwis Mukhopadhyay, Woodbury, Woodbury High School

NORTH CAROLINA Si-Yi Lee, Charlotte, North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics; Matthew Miller, Elon, Western Alamance High School

NEBRASKA Emily Chen, Omaha, Brownell-Talbot School

NEW JERSEY Alison Bick, Short Hills, Millburn High School; Joshua Bocarsly, Plainsboro, The Lawrenceville School; Wenyu Cao, Belle Mead, Phillips Academy

NEW YORK Jonathan Aaron Goldman, Plainview, Plainview-Old Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School; Jan Gong, Garden City, Garden City High School; Michelle Hackman, Great Neck, John L. Miller Great Neck North High School; Bryan He, Williamsville, Williamsville East High School; Matthew Lam, Old Westbury, Jericho High School; Grace Phillips, Larchmont, Mamaroneck High School;Alydaar Rangwala, Loudonville, The Albany Academies

OREGON Laurie Rumker, Portland, Oregon Episcopal School; Yushi Wang, Portland, Sunset High School

PENNSYLVANIA Benjamin Clark, Lancaster, Penn Manor High School; Keenan Monks, Hazleton, Hazleton Area High School

TEXAS Madeleine Ball, Dallas, Ursuline Academy of Dallas; Rounok Joardar, Plano, Plano West Senior High School; Sunil Pai, Houston, The Kinkaid School