Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Friday November 25 2016, @05:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the when-you-can-no-longer-shine-a-light? dept.

When are brilliant scientists the most brilliant? What age are you likely to be when the Nobel committee comes calling? Pick one of the following answers:

  • You need a lot of expertise and wisdom to make a big breakthrough. You need professional connections, lots of research money, and big laboratories. Scientific breakthroughs come from people in middle age, or maybe even at the end of their careers.
  • It's the young upstarts who have lots of energy and fresh ideas. After all, the old scientists are stuck in ideas from the past. They're already past their prime. They're tired and don't have much energy any more. Am I talking about myself at the ripe old age of 56? I didn't get much sleep last night, and my knees are kind of sore :)

A new study gives us the answer: None of the above. There's no relationship between age and creative scientific contribution. The authors of the study analyzed 2,856 physicists, working from 1893 to the present. They found that the best predictor of exceptional creativity is productivity. It's lots of hard work. The scientists who do the most experiments, and test the most hypotheses, are the ones with the big contributions. The researchers found that once they'd controlled for productivity, age doesn't add any additional predictive power.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @06:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @06:23PM (#432942)

    Beyond Zionist conspiracies, it's hard to fault the Jews for maintaining a culture of educational achievement for these many centuries.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @07:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @07:05PM (#432961)

    Their intellectual achievement is especially astonishing, given their proclivity to cut up their own sons' sexual organs in mindless deference to barbaric relio-cultural blood rituals.

    Quite the study on the compartmentalization of stupidity, really.

    • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @08:42PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @08:42PM (#432989)

      Their intellectual achievement is especially astonishing, given their proclivity to cut up their own sons' sexual organs in mindless deference to barbaric relio-cultural blood rituals.

      Which is then rationalized after the fact by saying that it's for medical reasons (less chance of HIV, better hygiene, etc.), even though there is almost never an imminent medical necessity and mutilating people's bodies in such a visible way would never be accepted in other contexts. Freedom of religion means freedom to mutilate other people's bodies, clearly.

      Sadly, though, this disgusting practice is not limited to Jews.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @08:57PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @08:57PM (#432995)

        What I find morbidly fascinating about the practice is that for vaccines, which are by and large an amazingly positive achievement, there is a fund one can claim compensation from if one does have some kind of adverse reaction. Nothing's prefect, and such a fund makes sense. With ritual male genital mutilation, there's no such thing. The risks are completely glossed over. If something went wrong, it's fuck you.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @10:35PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @10:35PM (#433022)

          Nothing's prefect

          I need to print this as a motivational wall-scroll :D