Stroke of genius strikes later in life today – Technology & science – Science – LiveScience – msnbc.com
Young geniuses might have once made nearly all of the significant breakthroughs in science, but nowadays that’s doesn’t seem to be the case, a new study suggests.
Einstein once said, “A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so.” The genius himself discovered that matter was transmutable to energy with his famous equation E = mc2 and helped lay the foundations of quantum theory by that age as evidence for his claim.
That peak age has shifted considerably, the researchers found, with 48 being prime time for physicists.
Einstein-like geniuses
To investigate this notion further, researchers analyzed 525 Nobel Prizes given in physics, chemistry and medicine from 1901 to 2008. They compared how the age of peak creativity, measured by the average age at which Nobel laureates did their prize-winning work, varied between fields and changed over time within fields.
