The Stroke of Genius Strikes Later in Modern Life | Hacker News Reader

The Stroke of Genius Strikes Later in Modern Life

news.yahoo.com

78 pointstokenadult30 comments

The wrong assumption they are making is that the pace of science is constant, so that Nobel prizes (which are given out at a constant rate) are a rough approximation of progress. In physics, at least, this is very wrong.

In fact, fundamental theoretical physics has been more-or-less stagnant since the late 60's when the Standard Model was finished. But they have to keep handing out Nobel prizes. So the outcome is predictable: you see prizes being awarded to people who are fleshing out ideas which have been known for a half century; the low-hanging fruit has already been picked, so you have to work for years in the nitty-gritty to push the bounds. Hence, the prize winners are old.

But this doesn't tell us anything about physicists and when they are capable of genius (and how could it? does anyone really think that human nature has changed?), it tells us about the stagnation of the field.

The really interesting question is this: is the stagnation of physics more attributable to (a) some combination of fundamental technological/intellectual limitations or (b) institutional/social pathologies in Academia. Most people say '(a)', but I (as a young physicist) worry that '(b)' plays a substantial role.

Would you mind elaborating about (b) more? Thanks!

or c.) random chance.

Kuhn would say that science consists of long periods of "normal science", in which people flesh out basic theories that have been known for decades, and short periods of "paradigm shifts", where previously ignored evidence is suddenly incorporated into brand-new, world-shifting theories that completely upend the old order. Just because you happen to be in one of those long doldrums of normal science doesn't mean that something is wrong with science, or that the field has stagnated. It just means you're not in a revolutionary paradigm-shifting phase.

We have had more physicists working in the past few decades than in the rest of human history put together. Statistically, there are dozens of Einsteins and Feynmans and Newtons walking around. But no breakthroughs. You can't attribute this to chance.

Again, mere time is a bad metric for baseline progress.

Another way to say the same thing the article says is that «science has been rewarding creativity less and less». In that case, both (a) and (b) start to seem subtly related. Because once your hero ceases being a random wacko who was curious about weird stuff and comes to be a laborious researcher that climbed a lot of ladders, then the amount of effort you give to weird ideas decreases.

Another way to put it is that big science is replacing science, and i think it is. (Feyerabend's perspectives, albeit very different from that, seem to point out many of the problems...)

The article doesn't make the assumption of linear change in science, on the contrary, studying nobelists means you have only those who made the big leaps forward. There were big leaps in medicine and chemistry, and the pattern seems to be valid: to my knowledge in life sciences you have few young geniuses and many awards are given to collaborative work. Seems like a natural consequence of the fact that science has become increasingly complex and computational.

(a) is primary. Problems in physics are much harder to solve than they were.

For instance, the thing that corresponds to general relativity today is quantum gravity. Other paths exist, but the two that are most traveled are string theory and loop quantum gravity. The math involved in either one is considerably heavier than Einstein's relatively theory, and neither one is in a place where you can calculate real observable things.

There's plenty of (b) to go around, but it's hard to believe we'd know what dark matter is, discover supersymmetry, or have an established "theory of everything" if we cleared away the cobwebs.

This is indeed the story that is usually told, but I find it pretty lacking.

If the cause is indeed that it takes longer to get on top of increasing complex fields, then it doesn't bode well for the singularity - when scientists run out of lifespan (e.g. you have to be over 100 to get on top of the field), no more breakthroughs. Of course, it would be really cool if the entire field was overturned with a new abstraction that simplifies the previous epicyclic complexity, and opening up a new surface for young scientists to pioneer. Will that happen? Or is the complexity we see irreducible? I prefer the former...

It's another reason why we need to cure aging, just in case the reduced quality of life and huge medical expenses weren't enough.

Ageing is nature's way of making way for the young. If we cured ageing there would be more motivation to suppress new births, and then people like you and I might never have come along.

Seems more like "Genius strikes later unless there is a revolutionary breakthrough in your field, in which case it strikes early." Makes sense, since a breakthrough typically opens the door for other relatively low-hanging breakthroughs.

Right. It seems like it could go back to being the younger kids' game if there is some major breakthrough.

What has changed is that the cost of doing business in scientific fields such as chemistry and physics has become immensely higher. The current paradigm requires a facility on the scale of CERN to even have a hope of overturning Einstein's pen and paper side project of relativity via the discovery of faster than light particles.

In other words, the barrier to entry has been raised in science. Nobody is going to place a 25 year old Phd in charge of a major chemistry research laboratory these days.

On the other hand, in software development, the arts, and other creative fields with low barriers to entry, younger people continue to demonstrate genius regularly.

I think this happens because it is increasingly difficult to accumulate all the knowledge necessary to make you a specialist in your field (and to give you the opportunity to discover new things) until the age of 30.

If you need to provide a breakthrough in a scientific field, you need to know first what has already been done. Even Einstein took some time to understand metric tensor for his general theory of relativity.

Point is we may not be able to solve the aging problem, however as we progress we our children will be smarter to grasp complex subjects in shorter time. How much short time? That will depend on the intellect of the child. When I was in 8th standard my father told me that if I can I should finish all the math books upto 12th standard in a year. It may not be a full proof knowledge but it will give me some vision about what the math world looks like. I tried and succeeded partially (No claims here just what happend in my life). It was wonderful to know the world of maths. So we need to expose our young minds to so called advance topics in the subject of their choice. We do not know who is a genius. Moreover, a genius will eventually find a way to solve a problem that he/she wants to solve. Why? My guess - because he/she is a genius(also we do not know how a human brain works now and how it will work in the future).

nevertheless, Einsten didn't pause much for advanced Maths at his "wonder year", and seem to have given the subject more thought only when older...

Note the abstract for the actual paper is at http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/11/03/1102895108.abst... And some graphs from the paper are at http://www.blognome.be/2011/11/08/age-dynamics-in-scientific...

What the article hints at is the reason for this shift:

You need to accumulate more knowledge and do more work before the breakthrough. Meaning you have to start very early on your highly specialized journey.

Are there any recent (past 50 years or so) examples of someone doing great work in some field, but who started late (say age 25 or 30)?

Hodgkin and Huxleys seminal work in neuroscience was done in their late 30s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hodgkin%E2%80%93Huxley_model

Feynman formulated the path integral at age 30

You might want to consider tattooing this somewhere:

"It may be that young scientists did better, in part, because they never learned the older ways of thinking and could think in new ways."

Replace 'scientists' with e.g. 'musicians', 'designers', 'developers', or your profession of choice.

Quibble: their title reflects the widespread belief that breakthroughs are sudden eureka moments. I think that belief is damaging.

It surprised me that increased life expectancy wasn't mentioned. We live nearly twice as long as we did back in 1850.

As a 48-year-old (!), I can't tell you how hopeful this article made me feel.

You know, I realize a lot of life falls into the "shopping cart" effect. If there's 5 lines at the grocery store, there's an 80% chance you'll see another line moving faster than yours (there's only a 20% chance you picked the fastest line).

I've recently turned 30 but realize there is no race to make it. Not for me anyway. Maybe I'm turning Zen about it but who really cares when you "succeed"? "The people that mind don't matter, and the people that matter don't mind."

By the way, Colonel Sanders (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Sanders) began franchising KFC at age...65

Adobe was founded by a 42 and 43 year old, if it makes you feel any better. And if anything, we seem to be aging more slowly than way back then (1982). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Geschke http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Warnock

Ray Kroc who is arguably more transformative bought McDonalds at age 59 and turned it into the empire it is now. His autobiography Grinding It Out is an inspiring read.

I certainly don't claim to be a genius, but at 41 I'm writing the best code of my life.

But in ten years you'll run across an old code fragment and wonder "What was I thinking?" That's the way it works for me, anyway.

It may be unrelated, but I have noticed I appreciate statically typed languages a lot more lately. Having the compiler looking over my shoulder makes a lot of things easier.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com