BS#1 - Is Science A Young Man's Game?
Where we begin to explore whether the most important contributions in physics are due to the youth of the authors.
Learning is worthwhile for its own sake, yet in the past century scientific inquiry has become a job and there are many popular myths that can be highly discouraging. For example, is it true that only young minds are capable of innovation and paradigm shifts? This comes close to what Thomas Kuhn, still the most popular thinker concerning the history of science, claims in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”:
“Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change. And perhaps that point need not have been made explicit, for obviously these are the men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them.”
Max Planck even remarked in his autobiography:
“a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Important Publications
To find out if this really is true, I took the time to collect some data starting with important publications in physics and searched for the authors’ age when the influential article/book/discovery got published.
(The .csv with additional data and the notebook with the analysis can be found on my GitHub if you want to play around with it yourself or check if I have done a proper job, although I want to make it clear that I did not aim to develop a serious model.)
When we plot the distribution we see immediately the age distribution is skewed towards early life. Researchers in physics seem to peak with the age of the author between 25 and 40, yet - as we can see in the graph below - with a long tail up into old age!
While you may think this suggests that the common perception is right, consider that the mean here is just below 40. That really isn’t that young, is it? - While some revolutionize their respective field when they just lost their spots like Richard Feynman (at age 24, “The Principle of Least Action in Quantum Mechanics“), many still publish important work even later in life like Erwin Schrödinger (at age 57, “What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell”). Look at the spreadsheet and you will find Nicolaus Copernicus still published important work with 70, Feynman again with 64, René Descartes with 87, Galileo Galilei with 74 … and these are only a few big contributions. Early or later in life, don’t think your legacy will be diminished or forgotten because you were 50 and not 25.
We All Must Grow And Learn
It takes some time to reach the maturity required to publish anything of quality. Even if one already made a Nobel price worthy contribution early in life, this does not mean there is no room to grow any further. Einstein had his miracle year at age 26, quite early, sure, but what was arguably his masterpiece “The General Theory of Relativity” he was only able to complete ten years later.
Albert Einstein hit a roadblock he was eventually able to overcome with lots of help and by mastering mathematics strange to him before. So while he was much more innovative with respect to most of his peers, his personal progress fits this idea quite well: We are only human, we all must grow and learn. The rigorous study of nature is unnatural to us and no one is born with all the answers.
Leave a comment if you want to contribute to this discussion so that we can help each other understand!
But… so then why is the distribution so skewed towards young age?
Age Groups
“Maybe there are simply many young actively working physicists?”, I thought. This is the obvious next step if we want to understand how this distribution I showed you at the beginning is to be explained.
I found a few tables from a study mostly concerned about differences in productivity in academia, “Publication rate expressed by age, gender and academic position – A large-scale analysis of Norwegian academic staff” by Kristoffer Rørstad and Dag W.Aksnes, and extracted a data table concerning the author age distribution in the natural sciences & mathematics in general as well as one that shows us how many are PhDs, postdocs, associated professors or professors:
Of course, we see that young scientists are peaking around the mean we are concerned about, so it seems like we have found our primary group of innovators: The PhDs and postdocs! We must look at the general distribution to see if this makes sense. You might get a more complete answer from K. Brad Wray stating:
“… the popular myth about the correlation between youth and scientific discovery fails to take into account the proportion of young scientists in the population of scientists.”
Young scientists are overly represented. No wonder there are more youngsters that publish the really good stuff!
Productivity & Career Environment
One might also argue that they have more time to focus on research, while professors have many other obligations. Are younger scientists also simply more productive? Well, Stephen Cole writes in “Age and Scientific Performance”:
“The long-standing belief that age is negatively associated with scientific productivity and creativity is shown to be based upon incorrect analysis of data. Analysis of data from a cross-section of academic scientists in six different fields indicates that age has a slight curvilinear relationship with both quality and quantity of scientific output. These results are supported by an analysis of a cohort of mathematicians who received their PhD's between 1974 and 1950. There was no decline in the quality of work produced by these mathematicians as they progressed through their careers. Both the slight decrease in productivity over the age of 50 are explained by the operation of the scientific reward system. By encouraging those scientists who produce the most favourably received work and discouraging those who produce work that is not favourably received, the reward system works to reduce the number of scientists who are actively publishing. Those who continue to publish throughout their careers are a "residue" composed of the best members of their cohort. Increases in productivity through the thirties and into the forties are shown to be a result of command over the resources necessary to be highly productive.”
“Tenured personnel tends to have ∼40 per cent of their time to spend on research, while the figures for PhD students and postdocs are around 70–80 per cent. These differences are mainly due to the fact that the tenured personnel has much greater teaching obligations. […] it is not uncommon that PhD students and postdocs carry out much the time consuming empirical investigations (e.g. laboratory and fieldwork) while the tenured scientific staff is managing the project. Within a research group led by a professor, the professor will typically get her/his name on all publications produced by the group, while the PhD students and postdocs will be authors only in the publications they have been directly involved in (Kyvik, 1991).”,
added by Kristoffer Rørstad and Dag W.Aksnes again. But this is where it gets really, really complicated. I aim to dig deeper into this in the future. What we know for now is:
Science is not just a young man's game. We also have to take into account how much more young scientists are involved in research. We must not assume that they are inherently more clever than older ones or less biased. There are more of them playing and playing hard!