Is it because we have so much more information to process? That we have gummed up the innovation works with all sorts of superfluous check-points, from dissertation defense to publication vetting to research oversight and scientific experimentation review? Or has the rush caused us to slow down our thought processes in order make sense of it all?
Whatever the combination of answers may be, the evidence of the slowdown is manifest. As the following article asserts, the average age for Nobel Prize winners in various scientific categories has risen by an average of six years. And more in certain disciplines.
There are those who think we should be worried. That this suggests a drag on innovation and economic growth. But others think it may be that technology has obviated the need for some aspects of scientific research by shortening the research cycle and focusing more on commercial outcomes than academic rigor.
It may simply be that cognitive capacity is achieved earlier in new fields than in more established ones. Or it may be that we are acknowledging how much less we know than we thought we did. JL
David Wessel comments in the Wall Street Journal:
Conventional wisdom is that big scientific discoveries are made by the supple minds of the young. Albert Einstein famously said, "A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so."
But the age at which star scientists make their biggest discoveries or have their greatest insights has been rising since Einstein did his pathbreaking work at age 26 in 1905. The "age of invention," as economist Benjamin F. Jones of the Kellogg School of Management puts it, is rising. Therein lies a threat to prosperity.
Mr. Jones knows this because he has actually counted. Scrutinizing the lives of more than a century of Nobel Prize winners, Mr. Jones found that chemistry laureates who did award-winning research before 1905 did their seminal work at an average age of 36. Those whose landmark work was done after 1985 did it at an average age of 46.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, 60% of physicists did prizewinning work before turning 40; at the end of the 20th century, only 19% did. Werner Heisenberg won the physics Nobel in 1932 for work on quantum mechanics he did at age 24. Raymond Davis won in 2002 for experiments to detect cosmic neutrinos that he began at age 51 and completed at age 80.
This trend is clear even after taking into account longer life spans, which means more older scientists. One reason is that scientists are getting a later start. At the start of the 20th century, great minds began actively doing research at age 23. At the end of the 20th century, it was age 31. The student stage is longer.
Over the past 40 years, according to National Science Foundation surveys, the age at which the typical science and engineering Ph.D. finished the degree has climbed about two years to just over 31.
Why? Mr. Jones's hypothesis is that it takes more time to get to the discover-new-things stage because there simply is more to learn first. Newton, borrowing a thought others had expressed earlier, wrote in 1675: "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." To which Mr. Jones adds: "If one wants to stand on the shoulders of giants, then one must first climb the giant's back. As knowledge accumulates, the harder this climb can become." (So when your kids complain that there is more for them to learn than when you were in school, they are right.)
The lives of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg seem to challenge the notion that the age of young inventors is over. Mr. Jones has an explanation: When a field is young or taking off in a completely new direction, years of schooling don't matter much. It is at such moments that young minds often produce breakthroughs.
The 1920s revolution in physics offers a case study. At age 21, Mr. Heisenberg nearly failed his Ph.D. exams because he knew so little about classical electromagnetism. That turned out to be irrelevant to the pathbreaking work he did in the subsequent next four years. The personal computer and the Internet are similar: In the early phase, there wasn't much to build on, so breakthroughs could be achieved by the young and inexperienced.
The same phenomenon is seen in art. Those who perfect old techniques—Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Cézanne, Robert Frost, Alfred Hitchcock—do their best work late in life, says David Galenson, a University of Chicago economist who has been studying this for years. "Conceptual innovators"—Vermeer, Picasso, James Joyce, Orson Welles—make their marks early.
Most science isn't revolutionary, though. Most advances build on what has been done before. Getting a later start isn't a big problem as long as scientists work productively later in life. But they haven't been. That's the threat to prosperity.
"If innovation is central to technological progress, then forces that reduce the length of active innovative careers will reduce the rate of technological progress," Mr. Jones reasons. This is worrisome if the innovators—truly original thinkers—do their best work when they are young.
Yet Mr. Jones, who is 40, doesn't despair. Modern medicine, he says, has extended the length of time that people live but hasn't extended years of peak cognitive capacity. It may yet. And if the number of breakthroughs per scientist is falling because each researcher has fewer years to plow new ground, then one solution is more scientists. Cue China and India.
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