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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.


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday November 25 2016, @10:54PM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Friday November 25 2016, @10:54PM (#433024) Homepage

    It's not brilliance, it's politics. You get a person who singlehandedly solves the energy problem with safe affordable fusion or some shit, but then it is revealed that the person who potentially saved humanity once confided in another person that "A Mexican on the bus stank" when they were 19 years old, and now they're remembered as Adolf Hitler and by association their groundbreaking research is declared fringe at best and null and void by at worst by (((them))) for eternity.

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  • (Score: 1, Flamebait) by aristarchus on Saturday November 26 2016, @02:50AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Saturday November 26 2016, @02:50AM (#433083) Journal

    Now we all know (((what))) happened to Ethanol-fueled! Too bad he was not mature enough at 19 to actually qualify for a Nobel prize later on. Poor, poor bastard. The world weeps for Ethanol-fueled? Oh, the glory that could have been, if not he had been such a total ignoramous and racist and bigot. Ethanol_fueled, we salute you, but we also want you to fuck off and shut the fuck up, since you never came close to winning any award in science, and it was not your racist views that held you back, it was you basic and profound idiocy that is both the reason you were never acknowledged and the reason you are racist. Oh, and also the reason the only job you can get is servicing the military industrial complex, if you know what I mean.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 27 2016, @08:58PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 27 2016, @08:58PM (#433762)

    Can you provide a single example of this having happened?