[vivaldirules]

Conferences. There are thousands of them. Attended by many tens of thousands of bright people. How many university professors are there now? Many. And they still publish, they review each other's papers, their grant proposals, exchange their students, call each other by phone, and have beer with each other as often as possible. Certainly not all of them would I call great thinkers but there are plenty. And as with so many other things, salons which were elite and small in number have been democratized, globalized, and greatly expanded in number and the ways for communication to occur. If Hawkings or some other thinker wants to communicate with others, he's got a far better chance of encountering and exchanging ideas than at any other time in history, don't you think? Thinking and collegial rapport is not dead, I think. It's alive and well so long as there are still places of higher education. And pubs.