It seems like my best days are behind me. I won’t be making any major scientific breakthroughs now that I am in my 30s and married.
Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, compiled a database of the biographies of 280 great scientists, noting their age at the time when they made their greatest work.
The data remarkably concur with the brutal observation made by Albert Einstein, who wrote in 1942: “A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so.”
“Scientific productivity indeed fades with age,” Kanazawa says. “Two-thirds (of all scientists) will have made their most significant contributions before their mid-thirties.”
But, regardless of age, the great minds who married virtually kissed goodbye to making any further glorious additions to their CV.
Within five years of making their nuptial vows, nearly a quarter of married scientists had made their last significant contribution to history’s Hall of Fame.
“Scientists rather quickly desist [from their careers] after their marriage, while unmarried scientists continue to make great scientific contributions later in their lives,” says Kanazawa.
There is, however, a silver lining.
The energy of youth and the dampening effect of marriage, he adds, are also remarkably similar among geniuses in music, painting and writing, as well as in criminal activity.
Previous studies have documented that delinquents are overwhelmingly male, and usually start out on the road to crime in their teens.
But those who marry well subsequently stop committing crime, whereas criminals at the same age who remain unmarried tend to continue their unlawful careers.
I’ve had a much harder time with songwriting since I got married.
I don’t know if I should be hopeful or depressed by all this – I’m not male, I’m not married, and I’m only 21. Still though, makes me feel like time is running out for my big epiphanatic thought. Better say something poignant before my brain expires. 😀
I have to disagree with Einstein. The older I get the more original thoughts I am capable of. And the things I create in my mind would, without a doubt, work like a damn if I could just remember them long enought to write them down.
Hmmmm …
Come to think of it, the history of Mathematics abounds with instances of great Mathematicians making path-breaking discoveries in their prime, and the subsequent withering of their creativity.
Like GH Hardy said : “No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man’s game.”
However, there are anomalies to this “pattern” which are rather recent :
1. Wiles solved Fermat’s last theorem at age 40 (though he began working on it when he was 30)
2. Perelman solved Poincare’s Conjecture at 41.
So, irrespective of what Satoshi Kanazawa’s study concludes, I think it’s not an open and shut case – most of those 280 great scientists probably belonged to the pre-war era.