Innovators Are Older Than Ever

GrokSoup writes "A new study shows that great achievements in science are produced by older innovators today than they were a century ago. Using data on Nobel Prize winners and great inventors, the author shows that the age at which noted innovations are produced has increased by approximately 6 years over the 20th Century. This runs contrary to accepted wisdom in science, which says that most scientists peak in their 20s. It is also welcome news to those of us who have not yet, ahem, done our Nobel-winning work."

Comments

Either that

[FidelCatsro]

Or the Nobel commision just take 60-80 years to get around to honouring the scientists and the fact we live longer now on avergae so we have alot more time to relax into it... I would know better but i dont fancy paying for the paper.

Re:Either that

[the eric conspiracy]

Or the Nobel commision just take 60-80 years to get around to honouring the scientists

Well, when I was getting my PhD I worked with John Fenn. He was awarded a share of the 2002 Nobel Prize in chemistry when in his 80's. The interesting thing is that the work that merited this award (ion spray mass chromatography - allowed characterization of large biological molecules and led directly to the development of protease inhibitors) was done by John when he was in his late 70's.

John had a lot of trouble with the administration at Yale at the time because they were trying to force him into retirement. Now of course they are embarresed by the who episode because of Fenn's great accomplishement at the time they were trying to put him out to pasture.

John was a great person to work with too - genuinely cared about his students and an enthsuiastic teacher who did a great job both presenting difficult material as well as acting as a mentor.

I feel greatly priviledged to have known such a man. He is a credit to the human race.

Innovate vs Invent.

[team99parody]

This is related to the problem with Innovation vs Invention. Big business and the older folk mentioned here may be masters at twisting linguistics and taking credit for "innovations" like business model patents and restrictions on technologies, unlike the old-skool philosophy of inventions based on and leading to information sharing and broad education.

Late start

[josefkk]

I don't know how many other countries this is applicable to, but in Denmark, at least, the average age of people graduating from the universities (with the Danish equivalent of an MSc degree) is 29 or so. Presumably they aren't ready to participate in any cutting-edge research of the kind which might land them a Nobel Prize until then. Of course the corpus of knowledge in any given scientific field increases with time, and thus researchers are forced to spend a lot of time keeping up with things rather than innovating.

Re:Because...

[smittyoneeach]

There is a fine line between creative and procreative minds.
Euler had thirteen children with three surviving sons (not named George) and two daughters surviving.

Born and educated in Basel, he was a mathematical child prodigy. He worked as a professor of mathematics in Saint Petersburg, later in Berlin, and then returned to Saint Petersburg. He is the most prolific mathematician of all time, his collected work filling 75 volumes. He dominated eighteenth century mathematics and deduced many consequences of the newly invented calculus.He was completely blind for the last seventeen years of his life, during which time he produced almost half of his total output.

Thus, the whole 'vision thing' is vastly over-rated.

Marrying later?

[X]

I wonder how this comapares to the ages at which they get married? There is that theory that once you get married it's hard to have the singlemindedness that leads to great achievements. Of course, it's hard to seperate cause and effect, because a lot of scientists wait until after they've had some career success before getting married.

Not really interesting...

[gorehog]

So, the most interesting discoveries are made by people who have masters degrees? Six years is the time it takes to get a master's degree, get a grant and start doing serious work these days. By comparison the Wright brothers were able to work in a bicycle shop. People did not seem to need the same levels of funding to accomplish similar tasks a century ago. I wonder why?

The effect mentioned would simply seem to be a function of longer lifespans and the sorting effect of the education industry.

Of course, I also bet that scientists live longer these days. I also bet that the "scientists making breakthroughs" are coming from a more diverse background now.

lots of reasons

[bcrowell]

I can see lots of reasons why this might be true:

1. They claim a shift of 6 years over the course of a century. Well, life expectancy has gone up a lot in this century.
2. Big Science didn't exist 100 years ago. Today, you have people publishing papers in particle physics with 100 names on them. So out of those 100, who gets the Nobel Prize? The guy who's old enough to be the leader of the project.
3. In certain fields, such as string theory, it just takes a really long time to learn enough mathematics to be able to start working on it. String theory is an extreme example, but, e.g., physics majors today learn Maxwell's equations at age ~20, but when Maxwell did his work in the 19th century, it was cutting edge math, and he was actually known more as a mathematician, not a physicist.
4. In 1900, it was normal for people to get a PhD at, say, age 26, and go straight into research. Today, a PhD usually takes about 5-9 years, and then after that you end up doing a string of postdocs, say 1 to 3 postdocs at 2-4 years each. So you're maybe 34 by the time you even have your first faculty job.

I think there's definitely a certain type of mathematical/scientific work that is most likely to be done by someone very young. A classic example would be the three groundbreaking papers Einstein published in 1905, at the age of 26. Nobody else had the guts or the mental flexibility to come up with relativity, or the photon theory.

But then again, you have, say, Andrew Wiles, who proved Fermat's last theorem. That's a project that took many years of intense work in total solitude, and a young person just wouldn't be able to do it without committing professional suicide -- Wiles could do it because he had tenure, and could afford to fail.

Re:Well yes

[MSZ]

They have to know what has been done already, lest they invent the wheel and fire again and again.

And more seriously, to actually invent something complicated or make significat advancement of science you need to know a lot. Think about, say, genetic engineering, quantum physics or nanotechnology. If I were to try to propose something in these fields I'd probably be laughed out because it will be either completely wrong or blatantly obvious to specialists. I know very little about these fields.

As the sum of human knowledge grows, the time to learn to the level necessary to discover something new will grow also. That's unfortunate, but that's reality.

Re:Well yes

[Anonymous Coward]

"pretty good" programming languages were available decades ago, but people keep inventing new ones, and some of the new ones are pretty great.

Yes, but instead of taking the old ones and, say, changing the syntax, they start from scratch and retread old ground, over and over again, making the same mistakes, and the state of the art never advances.

An excellent example is XML databases: hierarchical data storage was tried and rejected decades ago. The practitioners today are retreading old ground, and the old-timers are shaking their heads.

Mathematicians and physicists frequently reinvent things, because better tools become available. example: proofs of Stokes' Theorem and Gauss's Law require a bit of effort in classical calculus, but both become special cases of a much more general theorem when you have the tools of differential forms available.

Yes, if you make progress, you can go back and see how what you did before was incomplete. This isn't "reinvention", this is forward progress. If you continue doing things the old way, you *don't* make progress. In fact, this lack of foundation knowledge is precisely why science constantly moves forward, and information technology seems to be constantly spinning its wheels.

GNU/linux is pretty clearly the result of wheel reinvention. some of us think this has been a pretty useful activity.

The main advantage of Linux is the license and distribution model, the rest of it is pretty boring. Actually, some of us would argue that the distribution model is actually *OLD*. That's how software and scientific knowledge used to be spread around.

wheel reinvention is obviously useful as a pedagogical tool

Yes, fine, but keep your pile of half-assed wheels to yourself, that's all I'm saying. Of course it's useful for LEARNING, but too much "learning" stuff these days is passed off as the final product.

Re:Maleable

[HyperBlazer]

there are many who could handle being introduced to some basic concepts from calculus and quantum mechanics at 12 years old.

Here we get into a debate over "basic concepts." I completely agree that some of the ideas from calculus can be taught much earlier: I self-taught intro calc when I was 13 or 14. On the other hand, part of my disagreement with this thread is what I see as a problem in our education system.

See, you can't learn what I would call "the basic concepts of quantum mechanics" until you've already learned A LOT of calculus. Specifically, basic quantum mechanics boils down to solving differential equations, and applying appropriate boundary conditions. One of the problems with the way I was taught quantum is that we were taught how to solve specific problems, but not how to approach these problems in general.

Why were we taught that way? Because the pressure to get us (as college sophomores) through a basic class on quantum denied us the opportunity to first learn differential equations.

If you're a wizard at solving DiffEqs, you'll find the math behind an intro to quantum class easy, and only the physical solutions would matter. Toss in a solid grasp of linear algebra, and you could easily cover the 2 semesters of quantum courses I took in one semester, with time to spare. What's more, you'd probably actually UNDERSTAND it, instead of just cramming enough before the exams.

Currently, we don't expect our undergrads to understand it. Understanding is supposed to come during grad school, when you do all this stuff again (or so I've heard from dozens of professors and grad students to whom I've complained about the fact that I don't feel like I understood a lot of the details from my undergraduate education). But in general, you can only expect to make important contributions when you grok those proverbial shoulders you're standing on, I would say.

but there's probably a lot more we could do to help smart kids learn at something like their full capability

I'll agree completely on that. But there's also a difference between offering enrichment for the rare gifted student and providing an education for the average student. For me, offering self-paced study of math was a great way to make sure math remained a challenge to me. The program only failed when, after buzzing through 3 textbooks, the school didn't offer anything else for me to do for a little over a year. On the other hand, that's an educational design which obviously will NOT work for everyone.

Re:Well yes

[shawkin]

I developed the first effective lung cleaner device. It should take lung disease out of the top 10 causes of death.
www.medicalacoustics.com

It generates low frequency sound using airflow turbulence and a reed / flapping flag hybrid. It took 18 years.The FDA trials are almost done.
I'm 57.
Shrug.

Re:Well yes

[dingfelder]

Interestingly enough, many people DO learn Physics and Calculus + much more by the time they are 18. The issue though is that most are not in the US.

I went to one of the top 10 high schools in the US and many of my friends were taking advanced placement classes like advanced calculus (at UNC) but most of the students only ended up with one year of calculus, if that.

At most US high schools, the standard of educations is lower than that, and most students do not get calculus until they are in college. Most of them have a dumbed down physics (not calculus based) in high school, if they take physics at all.

Contrast that to the education you get in other countries. My wife for example went to a normal school in New Zealand. In her school they taught a bit of algebra, geometry, trig, calculus every year, starting in 8th grade. This idea (of doing some concepts from all topics each year) is a much better plan than doing an entire year of 1 topic each year. By the time she graduated from high school for example, she had taken the equivilent of the following US college science and math courses: Advanced Calculus, Physics (with Calc), Organic Chemistry 1 & 2, Inorganic Chemistry, and Advanced Biology. When she went on to do a Zoology degree, she did not have to repeat any of those classes, since she had already completed them. Interestingly enough, when she went back to school in the US many years later (to get a Vet Degree) they made her take 30 hours of intro courses (most of those I listed for instance + freshman english) and needless to say, she got a strong A in all of them :-)

The point of all this?

You are right that kids should be able to complete their "basic" education earlier. The only part you missed is that many kids actually are, it it just the US education system that is slow.