

Why Nobel-Winning Scientists Are Getting Older - danso
http://priceonomics.com/why-nobel-winning-scientists-are-getting-older/

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chriskanan
_Jones and Weinberg noticed that even though scientists are beginning their
careers at a later age, they’re ending their careers at about the same age as
their predecessors. Today 's great minds are productive for a shorter period
of time than they were a century ago._

I wonder what hypotheses there are for why scientists a century ago were able
to be productive earlier. The paper has a few hypotheses that they think are
plausible:

(1) Distance to the knowledge frontier is rising. Older scientists only needed
to know fields A, B, and C to attack D, but to attack E, newer scientists
needed to know A, B, C, and D. This is the hypothesis they think is most
likely, and they give evidence showing that the age of patent holders and the
team size involved in patents has also been increasing.

(2) May be harder to get resources to do research now. One has to establish a
reputation to win grants to do innovative research, and that takes time. Did
research cost less a century ago?

My own question: How often does the student that does the Nobel prize winning
work win the prize versus it only going to the PI? The involvement of the PI
varies wildly. For example, Jocelyn Bell and Antony Hewish wrote the paper
that revealed pulsars, but only Hewish (Bell's advisor) won the Nobel prize,
although Bell made the initial discovery (Hewish had her looking for quasars
with the radio telescope).

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sukilot
Watson and Crick with DNA is the most famous example for "too much credit goes
to the PI"

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streptomycin
Watson and Crick were a young postdoc and a PhD student. If credit went to the
PI in that case, it would have gone to Bragg who was the head of the lab they
worked in.

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ninguem2
"Head of lab" is not appropriate. The Cavendish Laboratory (which Bragg indeed
headed) is/was the equivalent of a whole department or institute (of
experimental physics, chemistry and biology). The head of the actual lab that
they worked for, who was Watson postdoctoral mentor and Crick's PhD advisor,
was Max Perutz.

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hga
This is one of the critical details:

 _Still, there is hope. “New ideas sometimes serve as revolutions,” Jones and
Weinberg comment. Revolutions tend to favor the young. The average age-at-
discovery, in physics, took a dip at the beginning of the century. This is
where Einstein came in, who published his general theory of relativity at 26,
and Dirac, who wrote the “fever chill” poem. They attribute this to the impact
of quantum mechanics at the beginning of the century, when “the entire
worldview of physics changed”_

There's a _highly_ recommended books, _Thirty Years that Shook Physics: The
Story of Quantum Theory_ ([http://www.amazon.com/Thirty-Years-that-Shook-
Physics/dp/048...](http://www.amazon.com/Thirty-Years-that-Shook-
Physics/dp/048624895X)) that in part explains what's happened in the last
century and a quarter or so. That amazing 30 years of course produced a rash
of Nobels, and in the other Nobel fields then enabled further Noble research,
e.g. the 20th Century's preeminent chemist, Linus Pauling, got his Ph.D. at an
opportune time for him to do his postdoc work in Europe, and then apply the
developing quantum theory to his field.

Molecular genetics, particularly the elucidation of DNA, also resulted in a
truly wild ride for a few decades, something I got a feel of when I started
doing it in 1977.

Now, a lot of scientists are in Feynman's position, in a time where there's
lots of known stuff out there, but achievable Nobel worthy research is less
obvious to everyone, including those awarding the prizes.

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mkagenius
The field of computer science is in early stage. I wonder if there is such
analysis available for Turing awards.

EDIT: I have put in first 10 Turing awards in the sheet:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fTaSlme8EBJAAYWWjBh_...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fTaSlme8EBJAAYWWjBh_GyA80vIHkxCaJkWmkmD2CUU/edit?usp=sharing)
In case someone wants to join to complete the rest :)

~~~
mkagenius
Thank you so much Anonymous for completing it :) Computer science also seems
to follow the pattern in other sciences.

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littletimmy
Let's say that nobel prize winning scientists are getting older because
scientists need to accumulate much more information to be productive.

Doesn't it follow naturally that there will come a point where science will
practically be limited by the human lifespan? As in, there is so much one has
to learn before being a productive researcher that there simply isn't enough
time to learn it?

~~~
nostrademons
Thomas Kuhn published a landmark study on the progress and history of science
about 50 years ago:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Rev...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions)

His finding was that science works by accretion of facts, _except_ that over
time, a number of facts that don't fit the established theory build up.
Eventually, this reaches a crisis point where you realize that the current
models are unable to explain reality, and then they get thrown out (a
"paradigm shift") and everything needs to be figured out again from first
principles. At this point, younger scientists have the advantage, because the
"knowledge frontier" contracts back to nothing (almost...the new theory still
has to account for old experimental results).

The last major paradigm shift in physics was a century ago, with the twin
discoveries of relativity and quantum mechanics. You could probably argue that
we're due for another one soon - the weight of evidence that our understanding
of the universe is flawed has been building up, with unexplained results
around dark matter/dark energy/cosmology and the failure of superstring theory
to make accurate testable predictions. It's pretty likely that within our
lifetime physics may become a hot place for brilliant 20-somethings again.

But in the meantime, most of the action has been in computing. The field of
practical applications of computer science has been undergoing a paradigm
shift approximately every 10 years (wasn't yesterday's top Hacker News story
about that?), hence why we see so many young tech billionaires.

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jacquesm
Have there ever been 'physics billionaires'?

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nostrademons
Bob Noyce. Thomas Edison. Elon Musk.

~~~
jsprogrammer
What physics has Elon Musk contributed?

~~~
nostrademons
Tesla's battery technology arguably represents a paradigm shift in how
batteries work. At least, they reportedly re-envisioned it from first
principles. Tesla has chosen to keep this technology proprietary and make lots
of money off of it rather than publish it, but it's not unlikely that it
represents some serious original research.

How much of that is done by Musk himself is debatable. One of my pet peeves
about the Musk fan-club is that he tends to partner with some very brilliant
engineers and then get all the credit for the work they do. However, people
high up in his companies (more than one of them) have said that he involves
himself very extensively in discovering the technology itself, and his
bachelors and the first couple years of his Ph.D were both in physics, so it
seems likely that he does at least know the science behind what his companies
do.

~~~
amit_m
That's engineering, not physics. There is a lot of chemistry research that
goes into battery technology, but AFAIK Tesla's batteries use tried-and-proven
lithium ion tech.

Also, he dropped out of his Ph.D. on the first week. So it appears that he
didn't learn too much physics in academia. Rocketry and electric cars don't
involve too much advanced physics and he has top notch experts working for him
in all the relevant fields.

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MisterBastahrd
They're also getting older because we've had ground-breaking discoveries that
took years, if not decades, before we had adequate technology to do anything
with them.

