Thursday, June 02, 2005
Wisdom Comes With Age?
This has got to be the least politically astute article I have ever read.
In both cases, you are the underling to the revenue generating, paper-signing professor, generally until well past the age that Einstein published his seminal papers while working for the patent office. I wonder what this study would look like if it was based on the grad students that do the majority of the work as opposed to the profs that got the credit?
A new study of Nobel Prize winners and great inventors suggests top innovators are older today than they were a century ago....In the first place we have not seen anything anywhere near the kinds of breakthrough discoveries in the last 100 years that we saw when the 1800's moved into the 1900's (Einstein, Bohr, Plank....) But the reason this is true is pure politics and finanaces. In the non-theoretical fields, it just costs too much money to do it outside of the university. In the theoretical fields, you have to do your university apprenticeship.
...Jones figures that the accumulation of knowledge over time -- all that stuff that most of us don't know -- means even great minds need to spend more time educating themselves before they can make a breakthrough.
In both cases, you are the underling to the revenue generating, paper-signing professor, generally until well past the age that Einstein published his seminal papers while working for the patent office. I wonder what this study would look like if it was based on the grad students that do the majority of the work as opposed to the profs that got the credit?
