Well, Benjamin Jones and Bruce Weinberg studied 525 Nobel prize winners (182 of them in physics) and found what age prize winners were when they won their prize, and surprisingly it has increased over time. For physics in particular, the average age of people when they produced their prize winning research for prizes won before 1905 is 36.9 years old. However, for the period after 1985, the average age when people produce Nobel prize winning research is 50.3 years old. That's 13.4 years of difference! It seems you're not useless after age 30 afterall. At one point they write:
Werner Heisenberg, who developed his matrix mechanics in 1925 at age 23 and his uncertainty principle 2 y later, may provide a useful window into early career contributions during this period. Strikingly, Heisenberg did not seem particularly young for an important physicist at the time; Pauli and Dirac made contemporary, prize-winning contributions at ages 25 and 26. In the previous 10 y, the majority of Nobel Prizes in physics had been given to individuals for work done by their early 30s, and Dirac and Einstein suggested that, by age 30, a physicist was effectively dead. However, as [we] show, one cannot make similar claims about chemistry or medicine at that time or about physics today.
However, they do offer some good insights into what is going on here.
One way to understand these results is with Kuhn's theory of paradigm shifts in science. Back in the day of Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and others, the paradigm had been shifting drastically from Newtonian mechanics to quantum mechanics. At this point, old research becomes not nearly as important to the current research and it gets left in the dust as the new generation, with fresh ideas, sweeps in and starts publishing like crazy -- running the age of when people make important discoveries really low (e.g. a lot the people getting Nobel prizes for their early quantum mechanics discoveries were young when they made those discoveries). However, as the years go on, the new theory settles in, and the people who are able to do well and make discoveries are people working within the current paradigm. Since you have to be very skilled to produce in the current paradigm, it is natural that you will be older.
However, this is not the whole story. They also emphasize the dependence on theoretical knowledge (which can be more deductive and abstract) versus inductive knowledge (which is gained from experiment and gathering knowledge in the field). The thinking is then that younger people are actually a boon for theoretical knowledge. Indeed, one can find that while the age has increased for both experimental and theoretical discoveries, the average age for important theoretical discoveries is about 4.4 years earlier than that of important experimental discoveries.
However, this is not the whole story. They also emphasize the dependence on theoretical knowledge (which can be more deductive and abstract) versus inductive knowledge (which is gained from experiment and gathering knowledge in the field). The thinking is then that younger people are actually a boon for theoretical knowledge. Indeed, one can find that while the age has increased for both experimental and theoretical discoveries, the average age for important theoretical discoveries is about 4.4 years earlier than that of important experimental discoveries.
To back these results up, they also analyzed the 100 most-cited papers from the three Nobel prize eligible fields (in the 20th century). Every paper has a lot of citations to previous work, and since that work is done (usually) before the paper, there is an "age" of the citation when the paper is published. For example, if a paper has one citation to an article in 1960 and the paper itself is published in 2000, then the age of the citation is 40. This is the number they're looking at. If the number is small, then most of the work was done recently. If the number is larger, the research is drawing on more older material. I have some technical issues with this, but interestingly the number has been getting larger. Unsurprisingly, when we had the quantum revolution, this number became very small, but has steadily grown since then -- consistent with the data from Nobel prize winners.
This is interesting since it turns some popular wisdom about "good discoveries in science" on its head -- you don't need to be under 30 to make a great discovery. However, it's not as good for those of us in theoretical work since being earlier in age still has an effect. Much of this is related to the fact that we are well in the paradigm of quantum mechanics and we're just doing science as usual. If something were to come and completely overturn quantum mechanics, then the younger scientists would again see their day with many Nobel prizes. Don't hold your breath on that one though, young scientists.
This is interesting since it turns some popular wisdom about "good discoveries in science" on its head -- you don't need to be under 30 to make a great discovery. However, it's not as good for those of us in theoretical work since being earlier in age still has an effect. Much of this is related to the fact that we are well in the paradigm of quantum mechanics and we're just doing science as usual. If something were to come and completely overturn quantum mechanics, then the younger scientists would again see their day with many Nobel prizes. Don't hold your breath on that one though, young scientists.
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