Nobel's Late-Life Prizewinners

The shift in aging physicists is influenced by many things, one of them the fact that U.S. universities abandoned mandatory retirement ages in 1994, allowing scientific geniuses to work longer. Another factor, Weinberg says, is how physics has changed from a more theoretical field, where younger minds tend to dominate, to a more empirical, or less abstract, one. It’s in this area of science — which typically encompasses medicine — that the older mind can have something of an advantage. “What it takes to do great empirical work is an accumulation of knowledge and fact and an understanding of how to put pieces in the right places,” he says. “And you get better at that as you age."

And that’s potentially good news for science as a whole, given that Weinberg has also found that the average age of scientists, including computer scientists, has been creeping upward, from 45 to 49 between 1993 and 2010. This upward trajectory is greater than in the workforce as a whole and will continue even after the boomers have finally retired.

While the shift is exciting if you’re a genius hoping for a third act, it could tend to make people obsessed with innovation a little nervous, as they may worry that brilliant old people won’t retire and make room for brilliant young people, who they might assume will make them more money. But that concern turns out to be somewhat unfounded, too, especially if you use patent applications as a litmus test. For starters, one of the most important filings of this year went to a 94-year-old, John Goodenough. He and his team at the University of Texas at Austin developed a cheap, lightweight battery that promises to revolutionize electric vehicles.

For bigger proof, John P. Walsh of the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology studied thousands of patent applications in the U.S. and Japan to find that people over 55 have the greatest chance of receiving a “high value” patent, or one that can make someone lots of money. (The finding was stronger in the U.S. than in Japan, where there remains “strong pressure to retire people in their 50s or 60s,” Walsh says.) As he sums it up, “There is a tendency to think of innovation as something you do when you are very young, but that’s not the case. There are lots more senior people who are contributing, and lots of contributions come from more senior people.”