Do scientists hit their creative peak at a relatively young age in their careers?

Food for thought!

"Can old scientists learn new tricks?

Famed polymath Sir Isaac Newton did much of his work developing calculus in the mid-1660s, when he had not yet celebrated his 25th birthday.

Albert Einstein’s “annus mirabilis,” during which he published the revolutionary papers that would become the foundation of modern physics, occurred when he was only 26 years old.

And Maria Skłodowska-Curie was just 31 when she discovered radium and polonium.

These anecdotes give the impression that scientists hit their creative peak relatively early in their careers, an idea that has been supported by some studies. Other research, however, has found no such relationship between age and declining creativity, while one theory holds that more experienced researchers are better poised to generate new ideas. According to a Policy Article published yesterday in Science, the relationship between age and innovation may be more complicated than that.

The authors of the new study analyzed a dataset of more than 12.5 million scientists who published between 1960 and 2020.

They found that, as the years since initial publication increased, scientists became more adept at forging links between previously unconnected ideas.

At the same time, however, their capacity for truly disruptive innovation—work that overturns established paradigms with transformative breakthroughs—sharply declined.

This cycle held true across disciplines, from computer science to biology.

The study authors also note the existence of a “nostalgia effect,” in which scientists increasingly cite older papers as their career progresses. “These findings highlight a universal tension between science’s forward momentum and aging scientists’ growing attachment to the intellectual past,” the team writes.

The researchers also found that nations with younger scientific workforces, such as China and India, tend to produce a larger share of disruptive papers.

The United States, which has a comparatively older workforce (in part thanks to a 1994 Supreme Court decision that removed mandatory university retirement), has lower rates of disruption. “Together with the nostalgia effect, these results suggest that familiarity with established ideas narrows the scope of creative search,” the study authors write. “Aging scientists grow more adept at recombining what they know but become less inclined (or able) to abandon old concepts and replace them with new ones.”

Of course, referencing foundational papers and building on existing knowledge remains an integral part of the scientific enterprise. “Aging people are not less creative, they are just creative differently ,” ... 

find ways to balance novelty with disruption, he argues, potentially by encouraging more collaborations across generations and welcoming young scientists from other nations. ...

Even the greatest minds, the study authors note in their paper, risk becoming set in their ways as they age.

In his later years, for example, Einstein struggled to develop a unified field theory and refused to accept the rise of quantum mechanics.

Speaking of quantum theory, physicist Werner Heisenberg published his pioneering work on the subject in 1925, when he was just 23 years old."

From the abstract:

"Scientific careers today are marked by growing polarization:

A small number of scientists now remain active and influential for longer than ever , whereas many others pass through research as temporary workers. 

Lengthened training periods, the elimination of mandatory retirement, and funding systems that reward experience have concentrated resources among senior scientists. 

As science becomes increasingly dependent on its aging core, a central question arises: How does academic age influence creativity?

The answer has long divided scholars. Analyzing more than 12.5 million scientists who published between 1960 and 2020,

we find that novelty—the linking of previously unconnected ideas—increases with academic age,

whereas disruption—the replacement of established ideas with new ones—declines.

These and other findings invite reflection on potential implications for policy, such as funding, tenure, and promotion systems; immigration and mobility; workforce development; and incentives for (and barriers to) collaboration and innovation."

ScienceAdviser

The ‘nostalgia effect’: Scientists produce less disruptive work as they age

Aging and the narrowing of scientific innovation (no public access) "Aging researchers and the removal of retirement policies yield decreased disruptive innovation in science"

The Forgotten Montgolfiere hot air balloon Flight of 1783

Recommendable!

The Secret To Galileo’s Groundbreaking Telescope Revealed By Surprising Item

Very recommendable! What are cannon balls good for? 😊

Physicists recreate forgotten 1938 experiment observing nuclear fusion

Amazing stuff! Nice detective work!

"... Tritium was discovered in 1934 by experimental physicist Ernest Rutherford’s team. ... Starting with 1934, Paris scoured the published physics literature, eventually coming across Ruhlig’s single-author, 1938 letter to the editor published in Physical Review about a gamma-ray experiment. ...

Ruhlig was working with deuterium-on-deuterium interactions: blasting deuterium with a beam of deuterons and studying gamma-ray effects. ... In what is nearly an aside in the final paragraph of the letter, Ruhlig described observing protons with extremely high energies, inferring that they were generated by secondary reactions: tritium-on-deuterium fusion neutrons scattering protons out of a thin cellophane foil placed inside a cloud chamber. He cited a private conversation with Hans Bethe in unpacking what he’d seen. The DT reaction “must be an exceedingly probable one,” he concluded, offering a quantitative estimate of one in 1,000 energetic protons against lower-energy protons. ..."

From the abstract:

"Experiments are described, and results are provided, for the duplication of the first-ever triton-deuterium (colloquially referred to as DT) fusion experiment accidentally performed by A. J. Ruhlig in 1938, but forgotten in the published scientific literature.

We find that Ruhlig overestimated the ratio of the triton-deuterium over deuteron-deuterium neutron yields in his secondary reaction (reaction-in-flight) experiment compared to modern theoretical calculations and our duplication of his experiment using modern neutron detection methods.

Nevertheless, Ruhlig's observation provided the motivation for the application of DT fusion after World War II and its more recent importance in peaceful energy production at DT fusion facilities around the world.

Additionally, the experimental technique used in the present work provides a novel approach for checking on low-energy triton stopping powers in deuterium containing compounds."

Physicists recreate forgotten experiment observing fusion

Physicists re-create forgotten experiment observing fusion (original news release) "Team sheds light on role of physicist and development of deuterium-tritium fusion"

Modern version of the uncited 1938 experiment that first observed DT fusion

Search for Gamma-Rays from the Deuteron-Deuteron Reaction (by Arthur Ruhlig 1938, no public access)

Arthur J. Ruhlig circa 1930s. Photograph courtesy Vivian Ruhlig Lamb.

Research from the Margins

Recommendable (but I admit, I did not read the whole article)! Science in the margins!

"Marginalia, in the form of not just notes but scribbles, doodles, corrections, and illuminations, is by no means confined to the realm of mathematics. And while in the case of Fermat’s Last Theorem such additions to printed texts were a key impetus for beginning the study of a problem, in other cases, marginalia are equally integral to a problem’s solution. Such notes—appearing in books and offprints, on photographs and squeezes, and on notecards—transform what might seem like static artifacts into dynamic records of scholarly engagement. They document the history of how scholars have interpreted, connected, and published ideas throughout time and space, creating a multilayered conversation that can even stretch across millennia. 

The Institute has its own intriguing collection of marginalia. Some give insight into the character and work of IAS scholars, while others offer a glimpse into Institute history. More still offer themselves as opportunities for under­standing engagement with texts over time, particularly those within the rare books collection, which includes a notable edition of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolvtionibus orbium coelestium, libri VI. These inscriptions are a visual representation of both the solitary study and the conversations through paper that profoundly enrich scholarship at the Institute, and will continue to do so as scholars carry on the storied tradition of scribbling. ..."

Research from the Margins - Ideas | Institute for Advanced Study

Chinese star catalog is the world’s oldest older than the Greek's earliest catalog, astronomers claim

Amazing stuff!

"The emperor’s chariot. A celestial marketplace. A toilet with excrement represented by a single star. Early Chinese astronomers, likely including a legendary one named Shi Shen, at some point grouped the stars they saw into depictions of an imperial court in the sky. ...

After testing their method on more recent, better understood Chinese catalogs in a study published last year, [the researchers] tried to look at Shi’s catalog. Their new results, soon to be published in Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, argue some star measurements within Shi’s catalog were updated around 125 C.E.—but that the other half of the star coordinates date back to about 355 B.C.E., around when Shi was supposed to have lived. ..."

From the abstract:

"Ancient stellar observations are a valuable cultural heritage, profoundly influencing both cultural domains and modern astronomical research. The \textit{Shi's Star Catalog}, the oldest extant star catalog in China, faces controversy regarding its observational epoch. Determining this epoch via precession assumes accurate ancient coordinates and correspondence with contemporary stars, posing significant challenges.

This study introduces a novel method using the Generalized Hough Transform to ascertain the catalog's observational epoch. This approach statistically accommodates errors in ancient coordinates and discrepancies between ancient and modern stars, addressing limitations in prior methods.

Our findings date the \textit{Shi's Star Catalog} to the 4th century BCE, with 2nd-century CE adjustments.

In comparison, the Western tradition's oldest known catalog, the Ptolemaic Star Catalog (2nd century CE), likely derives from the Hipparchus Star Catalog (2nd century BCE). Thus, the \textit{Shi's Star Catalog} is identified as the world's oldest known star catalog. Beyond establishing its observation period, this study aims to consolidate and digitize these cultural artifacts."

Chinese star catalog is the world’s oldest, astronomers claim | Science | AAAS "Novel computer analysis of records ascribed to legendary Chinese astrologer dates them to nearly 2400 years ago"

Determining the observational epoch of the Shi's star catalog using the generalized Hough transform method (preprint, open access)

A seventh century star chart found in Dunhuang, China, includes this map of the celestial north pole based on a synthesis of ancient Chinese astronomical schools of thought.

The map’s faded, reddish stars belong to a star catalog created by the legendary Chinese astronomer Shi Shen [4th century BCE]: a record that a new study now claims is the oldest surviving star catalog found anywhere in the word.

Around the first century B.C.E., Chinese astronomers started to use devices called armillary spheres to measure objects’ coordinates in the night sky. This more modern armillary sphere, built in the 18th century, stands on the grounds of a Beijing observatory founded in the 15th century.

Even faced with the same data, ecologists sometimes come to opposite conclusions

Not only ecologists! Human error, sometimes persistent and widely accepted, is common in science! Just take that global warming/climate change nonsense!

This is just another study confirming the obvious! Scientists are all too human!

"Give a group of scientists the same data and the same research question, and they should come up with similar answers—in theory. But they don’t, according to a paper published this month in BMC Biology, which finds that 246 ecologists analyzing the same data sets reached widely varying conclusions, with some finding effects in totally opposite directions. ..."

From the (long) abstract:

"Although variation in effect sizes and predicted values among studies of similar phenomena is inevitable, such variation far exceeds what might be produced by sampling error alone.

One possible explanation for variation among results is differences among researchers in the decisions they make regarding statistical analyses. A growing array of studies has explored this analytical variability in different fields and has found substantial variability among results despite analysts having the same data and research question. Many of these studies have been in the social sciences, but one small “many analyst” study found similar variability in ecology. We expanded the scope of this prior work by implementing a large-scale empirical exploration of the variation in effect sizes and model predictions generated by the analytical decisions of different researchers in ecology and evolutionary biology. We used two unpublished datasets, one from evolutionary ecology (blue tit, Cyanistes caeruleus, to compare sibling number and nestling growth) and one from conservation ecology (Eucalyptus, to compare grass cover and tree seedling recruitment).

The project leaders recruited 174 analyst teams, comprising 246 analysts, to investigate the answers to prespecified research questions. Analyses conducted by these teams yielded 141 usable effects (compatible with our meta-analyses and with all necessary information provided) for the blue tit dataset, and 85 usable effects for the Eucalyptus dataset.

We found substantial heterogeneity among results for both datasets, although the patterns of variation differed between them. For the blue tit analyses, the average effect was convincingly negative, with less growth for nestlings living with more siblings, but there was near continuous variation in effect size from large negative effects to effects near zero, and even effects crossing the traditional threshold of statistical significance in the opposite direction. In contrast, the average relationship between grass cover and Eucalyptus seedling number was only slightly negative and not convincingly different from zero, and most effects ranged from weakly negative to weakly positive, with about a third of effects crossing the traditional threshold of significance in one direction or the other. However, there were also several striking outliers in the Eucalyptus dataset, with effects far from zero.

For both datasets, we found substantial variation in the variable selection and random effects structures among analyses, as well as in the ratings of the analytical methods by peer reviewers, but we found no strong relationship between any of these and deviation from the meta-analytic mean. 

In other words, analyses with results that were far from the mean were no more or less likely to have dissimilar variable sets, use random effects in their models, or receive poor peer reviews than those analyses that found results that were close to the mean. The existence of substantial variability among analysis outcomes raises important questions about how ecologists and evolutionary biologists should interpret published results, and how they should conduct analyses in the future."

Even faced with the same data, ecologists sometimes come to opposite conclusions | Science | AAAS

Same data, different analysts: variation in effect sizes due to analytical decisions in ecology and evolutionary biology (open access)

One large Milky Way galaxy or many galaxies? 100 years ago, a young Edwin Hubble settled astronomy’s ‘Great Debate’

Recommendable!

Maybe one day a scientist or a group of scientists will find out that the sun and fluctuating solar activity is the greatest influence on climate change on earth. I am still optimistic and waiting. 😊

One large Milky Way galaxy or many galaxies? 100 years ago, a young Edwin Hubble settled astronomy’s ‘Great Debate’

Edwin Hubble uses the telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory. Can you imagine a scientist today standing next to a scientific instrument smoking a pipe?

How Rosalind Franklin's groundbreaking DNA discovery was overlooked.

Very recommendable!

Leonardo's Scientific Experiments and Discoveries | Leonardo da Vinci by Ken Burns

Very recommendable!

The Weird Way We Discovered DNA

Recommendable!

The Discovery of DNA

Recommendable!

Why So Many Great Scientists Come From Hungary

Recommendable! It is indeed quite unusual!

Weather forecasts have become much more accurate up to 7 days

Recommendable! Nice overview article on the history of meteorology! Given the complexity of weather, it is a slow progress!

Well, weather forecasts are still quite inaccurate especially beyond 48 hours.

The proponents of Global Warming and Climate Change heavily rely on climate model forecasts of up to 100 years. What a huge scam!

"... The biggest improvements we’ve seen are for longer timeframes. By the early 2000s, 5-day forecasts were “highly accurate” and 7-day forecasts are reaching that threshold today. 10-day forecasts aren’t quite there yet but are getting better. ..."

Weather forecasts have become much more accurate; we now need to make them available to everyone - Our World in Data A four-day forecast today is as accurate as a one-day forecast 30 years ago.

The Verona astrolabe was adapted, translated and corrected for centuries by Muslim, Jewish and Christian users in Spain, North Africa and Italy

Amazing stuff!

"The identification of an eleventh century Islamic astrolabe bearing both Arabic and Hebrew inscriptions makes it one of the oldest examples ever discovered and one of only a handful known in the world.

The astronomical instrument was adapted, translated and corrected for centuries by Muslim, Jewish and Christian users in Spain, North Africa and Italy. ...

“This isn’t just an incredibly rare object. It’s a powerful record of scientific exchange between Arabs, Jews and Christians over hundreds of years.” ..."

From the abstract:

"This article presents a hitherto unknown remarkable astrolabe from Al-Andalus which likely belonged to the collection of Ludovico Moscardo (1611–1681) assembled in Verona in the seventeenth century. The astrolabe is datable to the eleventh century and features added Hebrew and Latin inscriptions. It underwent many modifications, additions, and adaptations as it changed hands and owners over time thus becoming a palimpsest object. With its added translations from Arabic into Hebrew, the astrolabe closely recalls the recommendations prescribed by the Spanish Jewish polymath Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089–1167) in the earliest surviving treatise on the astrolabe in the Hebrew language written in 1146 precisely in Verona. The astrolabe—today preserved in the Fondazione Museo Miniscalchi-Erizzo—stands out as a testimony to the contacts and exchanges among Arabs, Jews and Europeans in the medieval and early modern periods."

The Verona astrolabe The discovery of an extremely rare astrolabe reveals a complex history of Islamic – Jewish scientific exchange

A Medieval Islamic Astrolabe with Hebrew Inscriptions in Verona

The 17th century geologist who discovered the 'abyss of time' in Scotland

Recommendable! Unfortunately, after about the 10th minute this otherwise great video turns into a Climate Change religion propaganda!

Unearned authorship pervades science so do other questionable research practices

Science is a human endeavor! Like all human endeavors it is flawed! 

Anybody, who claims science is beyond doubt is a fool and/or a charlatan! The history of science is littered with once great, widely accepted, but in hindsight grotesque theories that became obsolete!

"... The International Research Integrity Survey (IRIS) received responses from around 47,000 academics in Europe and the United States about their experience of eight QRPs, including inadequate peer review; deliberate failure to report contradictory findings; lack of supervision of junior colleagues; and conducting research without ethics approval. Inappropriate authorship — listing authors who did not adequately contribute to a manuscript — was the most common QRP encountered by the respondents. ...

The responses were collected from academics across a broad range of fields, including the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. ..."

Unearned authorship pervades science

First known ancient Greek map of night sky found hidden in Medieval palimpsest parchment revealed by multispectral imaging

Good news! What else can we discover in palimpsests?

Notice: There are very old Greek orthodox churches in Egypt! Saint Catherine's Monastery: "Built between 548 and 565, it is the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery in the world."

"A medieval parchment from a monastery in Egypt has yielded a surprising treasure. Hidden beneath Christian texts, scholars have discovered what seems to be part of the long-lost star catalogue of the astronomer Hipparchus — believed to be the earliest known attempt to map the entire sky. ..."

From the abstract:

"New evidence for ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus’ lost Star Catalogue has come to light thanks to multispectral imaging of a palimpsest manuscript and subsequent decipherment and interpretation. This new evidence is the most authoritative to date and allows major progress in the reconstruction of Hipparchus’ Star Catalogue. In particular, it confirms that the Star Catalogue was originally composed in equatorial coordinates. It also confirms that Ptolemy’s Star Catalogue was not based solely on data from Hipparchus’ Catalogue. Finally, the available numerical evidence is consistent with an accuracy within 1° of the real stellar coordinates, which would make Hipparchus’ Catalogue significantly more accurate than his successor Claudius Ptolemy’s."

First known map of night sky found hidden in Medieval parchment Fabled star catalogue by ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus had been feared lost.

New evidence for Hipparchus’ Star Catalogue revealed by multispectral imaging (open access)

Figure 3. Detail of f. 53v (yellow tracings based on full set of multispectral images).

The library of St Catherine’s Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt yielded a palimpsest containing stellar coordinates by Hipparchus.

The Secret Magic of Alchemy with Leonard Nimoy

Recommendable! The origins of chemistry and medicine!  The early thirst for knowledge! Philosophers stone! Hermaphrodite! Quest for immortality and eternal life! The secret of life and creation! Monks and friars were also among the alchemists, e.g. famous Roger Bacon (reinventor of gun powder in the West after China)! 👀

Persecuted by the Pope. A popular Renaissance profession. How about Theophrastus Bombastus a.k.a. Paracelsus? Homunculus!

Isaac Newton was a devoted alchemist! Did he even suffer an episode of mercury poisoning?

Multiple Personality Disorder Identity Crisis

Recommendable! A historical account of multiple personality disorders and the beginnings of psychology/psychiatry! Or is it a history of quackery? Or a history of patients inventing their disorder, because it got them attention?

"... In the 1990s, a woman in Illinois sued her psychiatrist, the multiple personality disorder expert Bennett Braun, over his alleged role in making her believe, through years of hypnosis and heavy medication, that she developed more than 300 personalities. ...
Famous cases aside, some psychiatrists question the plausibility of reports describing people with 10, 20, or more different personalities, at least if the phenomenon is as common as some claim, and argue that cases are diagnosed at just a few institutions loyal to the idea. ...

One thing that psychiatrists on both sides of the debate can agree on is that pop culture references to the condition haven’t been particularly helpful ..."

Identity Crisis, 1906 | The Scientist Magazine®