alt Hacker NewsAs researchers age, they produce less disruptive work
Comments
I prefer the full quote by Douglas Adams.
I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
If researchers are like hackers, they can do their best work when they’re unaware that it’s impossible. As time progresses, what was radical can or often does become mainstream. Decades later, it’s part of the background and something that can be replaced.
A lot of time is lost in maintenance and overhead. Pundits and fundraisers don’t do research.
Einstein spent his later career trying to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics. He failed. So has everyone after him. It's not about Einstein being old. It's that it's a really hard problem.
>>> It was the Nobel laureate and quantum physicist Max Planck who wrote that “science advances one funeral at a time” (which is actually a somewhat artful translation of his original statement, in German) about revered gatekeepers and their nostalgia for insights past that keep leaps in scientific understanding from happening. Turns out, he may have been right.
Or he may have been wrong. I think it was Paul Feyerabend who showed that most paradigms (yes, including that one) of how science works are falsified by counterexamples in scientific history and practice.
We love to make a discovery seem like a triumph against evil and obstruction, and sometimes it happens, but sometimes it's just a discovery.
Disclosure: Old scientist.
They hit the nail on the head in the first paragraph.
Older people have influence, power, control to direct where resources are allocated.
No 25yo scientists has the werewithal or experience to challenge that until later in life.
It’s kind of like asking why old people have all the assets.
It seems obvious to me that younger people are more predisposed towards building their reputation (and taking some serious risk to do so) and older people are more predisposed towards maintaining what they've built. This feels like a pretty standard evolutionary psychology approach. It's not as if no one can disrupt in their older years, but in general people get more cautious as they get older. They're less interested in offending and upsetting, and less prone to intentionally diving into the most divisive topics.
I found Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" helpful on this topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...
Surely we want impact to be seen in our lives and not after our funeral. In such a case it is easier to think about huge things in the first part of the career as attainable, but later in life you might have 15 years left for which you will optimize your chosen battle to be able to see it to fruition.
> Even the greatest minds, such as Einstein, transitioned from disruptor to gatekeeper when quantum mechanics threatened his nostalgic view of the universe
Just watch Veritasium[1] take on this claim. Eistein claimed that QM in Copenhagen interpretation is non-local. Bohr claimed he proved Einstein wrong. And then came Bell and ruled out local hidden variables, proving the QM is non-local, at least in Copenhagen interpretation. Pity neither Einstein nor Bohr lived to that moment, so we can't know what they would say on that.
But in any case Einstein was right all the time.
Author must not have heard of Nobel Disease - many laureates go on to propose absolutely batshit insane theories. Sounds disruptive to me…
I desperately want to slap a huge “citation needed” on that first paragraph.
Disruptive work nowadays is not very popular with institutions and doesn't win you grants. What does win grants is plodding along on a same path usually towards some end goal that is the latest buzzword. Those who stay in academia all start aspirational and wish to change the world, but the system sucks it out of them.
[dead]
[dead]
It is not about the age, it is about the time you work in a specific field.
If you are newcomer to a field you simply don't know what is difficult and what is not. So you have a more open mind.
See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuval_Ne'eman
This guy was a soldier for 15 years before he studied physics for 3 years and discovered SU(3) and quarks before Gell-Mann did.
So switching fields opens your mind for new discoveries. If you stay very long in the same field you're mind gets just used to all the unsolved problems.