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

Well of course...

[jazzman251]

look at the professor in futurama...

Well yes

[keesh]

Because these days, everyone is expected to waste three or four years memorising things that can easily be looked up, rather than actually learning anything useful or cutting edge in a degree.

Re:Well yes

[Rei]

I disagree. Modern technological innovations are more and more dependant on having a large scientific knowledge base, which takes time to acquire. This, to me, seems the main reason for the increase - not some shift from a "golden age" in education. I would only expect this number to increase in the future.

Re:Well yes

[alienfluid]

Why is this a "waste"? Do you expect to do groundbreaking physics research without knowing and understanding the fundamental laws or even basic calculus? There is no point in re-inventing the wheel and so some time spent in reading literature is time well spent.

Re:Well yes

[Rei]

Um, no. For example, lets say that you want to come up with an innovation relating to modelling of airflow turbulence. Go ahead and try and do that without first learning the Navier-Stokes equations and familiarizing yourself with at least some of the dozen or so turbulence models. Of course, try learning the navier stokes equations and turbulence models without a solid physics background as well. Try to get that physics background without a calculus and algebra background, and try to get that without a basic mathematics background.

It's not about "memorization" - it's about learning, and there's an awful lot to learn to be prepared to work in a modern scientific field.

Re:Well yes

[Inspector Lopez]

There is no point in re-inventing the wheel

Often heard, but not true. In fact, wheel re-invention is extremely useful.

• "pretty good" programming languages were available decades ago, but people keep inventing new ones, and some of the new ones are pretty great.
  
• 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.
  
• GNU/linux is pretty clearly the result of wheel reinvention. some of us think this has been a pretty useful activity.
  
• wheel reinvention is obviously useful as a pedagogical tool. How many million times have students laid out some elementary circuit in VLSI, say, an eight bit adder? Would you hire someone to design a chip who had read all the literature, even memorized it, but had never actually laid out a single chip?
  
• wheel reinvention is a critical (and underused) feature of modern science. In principle, peer-review is a kind of wheel reinvention, however it is usually in the form of checking the math, if you will (that's not even always possible http://www.google.com/search?q=four+color+theorem) . The best kind of peer review is duplication: can somebody else duplicate the experment? It is a real tragedy in modern Science that whoever was First gets all the credit, when the person who was Second should earn our deep gratitude for independently checking the result.
  

Wheel reinvention provides a critical opportunity for the advance of science and technology, by creating an opportunity to find a better way, and to detect previously undiscovered vulnerabilities.

Re:Well yes

[mindaktiviti]

Getting all of that background should be done by the time you're 17-19, not 25-30. Kids should be able to finish high school calculus in grade 8, not grade 12. We need to expect more from them, otherwise they will do the bare minimum. The public school system moves at the pace of the lowest common denominator. ...Well, no that's not right, but they definitely move on the lower end of the spectrum. Also, in elementary/high school you are generally rewarded for memorization as opposed to expressing a higher form of understanding. That doesn't happen until sometime late in university. In some instances I believe that school can inhibit your inventiveness, because it certainly doesn't push you to learn on your own. You just have to do your homework so you can study for those exams, which will get you into university/college. It's all about marks marks marks.

Maleable

[Boronx]

If we had any brains in our heads, we'd be exposing 8-12 year olds to ground breaking work, when their brains are still maleable.

Re:Maleable

[quandrum]

Perhaps I'm being cynical here, but it seems our education system is designed primarily to teach the bulk of the population for a life of boring repetition. In the bulk of jobs today, creativity and critical thinking aren't considered an asset. However, the ability to do the same thing for 8 hours is.

Building on previous work

[alienfluid]

I think the reason for this is that any new invention/discovery now takes years of reading and understanding the basic work that has already been done. Scientists in the past did not have so much background literature/work that they had to comprehend as the scientists today have to. This is of course not saying that their discoveries were rudimentary or inconsequential, but just that they did not have to spend so much time understading already done work.

farhanahmed.net

The prerequisites are so much higher than before

[hung_himself]

Not surprising at all. The number of scientists is so much larger than before and the literature is so expansive that nearly all obvious things are or have been tried by somebody at sometime. Typically, it takes many years of trial and error (mostly error) before a young turk realizes this and starts to be able to narrow down the approaches that might actually work.

Perhaps even more important, is the amount of technology that is required before cutting-edge research can be done. With the possible exception of algorithm research (even then clusters help), this technology is not available to the general public. The young scientist will only have access to this technology in his/her "training" phase (which in biology is usually most of the 20's) while under the supervision of a more established scientist (who would get most of the credit should a breakthrough occur...). Even after starting up a new lab - it takes a few years to get everything in place and funding set up before you can try out those new ideas etc...

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.

It's time...

[orkysoft]

"It's time to leave science to the 150-year-olds!"

Great- a $5 article!

[kevcol]

Gee this is a wonderful submission. People are supposed to discuss the topic an abstract with about 10 sentences, unless you want to buy it for $5.

Can't the guy do a little more research to post some other like articles that we don't have to pay for?

Well, I guess no one RTFAs anyway so maybe this isn't any different.

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.