I think a lot is driven by environmental rather than genetic factors. For instance the article mentions that both The Road, and No Country for Old Men were written when Cormack was in his 70s. But very few people in their 70s are even trying to write, let alone get published.

I think there's something similar in chess where players tend to peak around their mid to late 30s. But a major issue there is that that's also the age that most players are having children and developing ever more interests. And they're competing against the younger generation which is still dedicating 100% of their life, and time, to chess. Absent some monumental edge, that's a battle you're going to inevitably lose - even if aging factors did not exist.

I think this is a gross cultural misconception. Most scientists do their best work in their 30s and 40s. See [0].

My take on this is that it takes about a decade before experience, knowledge and wisdom can be used to see a bigger picture to make a breakthrough.

[0] https://priceonomics.com/at-what-age-does-genius-strike/

The best works of Bach and Beethoven are from later in their life, although neither lived to be 85 (65 and 57, respectively), and also wrote great works in their younger years. Bruckner kept improving with age. There are also composers who lost it at a later age: Ravel, famously. Classical music is difficult, so experience does allow a better overall view, something which a lot of short works (such as pop songs) don't need.

On the bright side, most of us were never candidates for inventing relativity, really. I wonder if our mediocrity remains stable, of if we lose a proportional amount of capability as the luminaries did.

I think pop musicians are capable of doing greater works later, but the perception of pop works are so heavily influenced by the image/presentation of the artist that we view the works as lesser. I don't think there is something fundamentally different about pop music that leads to best works being earlier relative to other genres of music beyond that.

> I interpret it as the former requiring the creative fireworks of youthful neural elasticity and the latter the depth we associate with lived experience and wisdom.

That being said, I think an interesting factor would also be which of those who wrote major works in their later age already did a decent amount of writing in their earlier years. Even if you have life experience, I would imagine that you will have to build up the "muscle memory" of writing skills in your more elastic years (e.g. by becoming a successful writer after a lifetime of journalistic work or just minor literary works).

Yeah there are quite a few exceptions to this. I've been (re-)reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and two of the four people directly involved in the discovery and explanation of nuclear fission were 60 (Hahn and Meitner) the other two (Frisch and Strassman) were in their mid-to-late 30s. Shortly after, Bohr (53) figured out that the oddities of uranium's fission behavior were due to the different activation energies of U-235 and U-238.

I think the best place to look for major works late in life is probably historical writing, which calls for accumulated knowledge and wisdom. Looking at the four most recent winners of the Pulitzer Prize in history from 2023-2025 [0], all appear to be north of 50 based on their Wikipedia pages (which give dates of education if not dates of birth), and one is in her 70s [1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize_for_History [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqueline_Jones

> So the greatest physics, maths, poetry and pop music are done by people in their 20s.

I can, just from feeling, agree to the pop music. About math I would cite the example of Gilbert Strang, who made many books at advanced age, including one at age 86 or other publications well over the 70s. Another example (well not math, but CS) Donald Knuth. I do not know how is the whole statistic, but writing good books, even text books, does not seem to be teenager thing.

> So the greatest physics, maths, poetry and pop music are done by people in their 20s.

I think there's a chance this is itself a type of selection bias, because you're over-indexing on the famous. And fame has consequences.

Many music artists end up trapped by their own fame (and attendant expectations) and fail to update themselves over time, thus falling out of the limelight. But there are plenty who defy this trend. Tiesto, David Guetta, Kaskade, and Armin van Buuren in EDM, for example. Coldplay is another great example. Love them or hate them, they're still putting out chart toppers.

Something similar is true for scientists in my opinion. I think Richard Hamming had the most incisive analysis of this in 'You and Your Research' [1], which is worth reading in its entirety.

> But let me say why age seems to have the effect it does. In the first place if you do some good work you will find yourself on all kinds of committees and unable to do any more work. You may find yourself as I saw Brattain when he got a Nobel Prize. The day the prize was announced we all assembled in Arnold Auditorium; all three winners got up and made speeches. The third one, Brattain, practically with tears in his eyes, said, “I know about this Nobel-Prize effect and I am not going to let it affect me; I am going to remain good old Walter Brattain.” Well I said to myself, “That is nice.” But in a few weeks I saw it was affecting him. Now he could only work on great problems.

> When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren't good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards.

My view is that fatalistically assuming that age is an obstacle to creative output obscures the hidden variables that are genuinely determinative.

[1] https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/you-and-your-research-...