Old Age and Creativity

How many academic scientists end up being buried in managing science, particularly seeking funding? There’s way fewer aristocrats funding scientists as they would a zoo. Maybe the most visible advances come from those hungry enough and with time enough to do it?

Some of these older fellows trained a lot of students, such as bethe or wheeler. How old were the bell labs people when they did plan 9? Is Knuth still considered active? Maybe also, art is subjective while physics or engineering “just is”

> Mathematicians, a different breed entirely, had Leonhard Euler and Carl Friedrich Gauss who kept going until a very old age, for their times—76 and 77—despite starting very early, as mathematicians seem to do. This is not a universal trend: in the twentieth century, David Hilbert at 81 and André Weil at 92 are the only exemplars that come to mind.

What about Paul Erdős?

So age is just skin deep?

An interesting observation from an inside perspective. I was aware of a few physicists who had "peaked" early in their careers, Einstein was a prominent example. That poets show the same pattern is something I just learned.

About painters and other visual artists, it's true that many were still working and producing in their final years. OTOH it was often the case that in old age they worked in relative obscurity as younger artists with "modern" styles had become the ones sought after and celebrated.

I've come to understand that the merit of most contemporary visual artwork won't be decided until 50 or 100 years down the road. In his time Rembrandt was known mainly for his magnificent etchings, printmaking was his main business. Now we celebrate his paintings as much or more, but we have the luxury of centuries to have honed our esthetic metrics.

My hunch is that creativity among physicists is the product of a special kind of insight, a moment when a number of seemingly disparate (and possibly mundane) phenomena suddenly align within a brilliant mind. Maybe this is a pretty common experience, but in most instances the insight isn't about anything really important to the rest of the world. Mostly it's something that happens early in life, young adult years most likely. Careers are about working out the details and reducing it to words (and equations) others can understand, a very hard task to accomplish.

While much has been written about creativity we really know very little about what magical things make it happen in those rare and enchanted brains.

My personal theory on early peaking in physics and math is that the best proxy for intelligence, working memory, begins to measurably decline in your 40s.

It likely begins to decline even prior to that, as our ability to measure it is very rough and imprecise, which seems to align well with ages when physics/math geniuses peak, ~30s.