I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

If you are newcomer to a field you simply don't know what is difficult and what is not. So you have a more open mind.

See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuval_Ne'eman

This guy was a soldier for 15 years before he studied physics for 3 years and discovered SU(3) and quarks before Gell-Mann did.

So switching fields opens your mind for new discoveries. If you stay very long in the same field you're mind gets just used to all the unsolved problems.

I'd really love to see some researches on scientists who NEVER marry/have kids against people who married and have kids.

Or he may have been wrong. I think it was Paul Feyerabend who showed that most paradigms (yes, including that one) of how science works are falsified by counterexamples in scientific history and practice.

We love to make a discovery seem like a triumph against evil and obstruction, and sometimes it happens, but sometimes it's just a discovery.

Disclosure: Old scientist.

I suspect that sustained creativity may be a result of continuous exposure to new experiences and concepts (which younger people are naturally situated to encounter quite often), so I try to consistently add novelty to my life as I get older, specifically targeting things way outside my comfort zone or previous interests.

For example, I’ve always been sort of uneasy with flying, so I figured I would sign up for general aviation classes and learn to fly myself, which is something I never would have had the slightest inclination toward when I was younger. I ultimately didn’t go through with it, as while signing up, my wife strongly insisted that I find a different form of “novelty” to pursue, but I think it decently illustrates what I was attempting to accomplish.

Some more mundane examples include listening to music that I don’t enjoy, completely mixing up how I dress after decades of wearing the same thing, reading books opposite my interests, taking classes in fields different than what my degree was in, and trying to constantly meet people who are very different from myself.

I guess we’ll see if this has any effect or not.

Older people have influence, power, control to direct where resources are allocated.

No 25yo scientists has the werewithal or experience to challenge that until later in life.

It’s kind of like asking why old people have all the assets.

Perhaps more important is simple mental capability. This peaks around the age 25-35. I look back at some of the research I did around age 30, and - wow. Now, at age 60+, there is absolutely no chance that I could duplicate that level of sheer concentration and achievement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...

On the other hand, there was lot of disruptive work did survive, or we can call them “hallucinations”.

Hindsight is 20/20.

A lot of time is lost in maintenance and overhead. Pundits and fundraisers don’t do research.

Note: the actual title of the article is "Is This Why Science Advances One Funeral at a Time?" and was on the front page recently.

Just watch Veritasium[1] take on this claim. Eistein claimed that QM in Copenhagen interpretation is non-local. Bohr claimed he proved Einstein wrong. And then came Bell and ruled out local hidden variables, proving the QM is non-local, at least in Copenhagen interpretation. Pity neither Einstein nor Bohr lived to that moment, so we can't know what they would say on that.

But in any case Einstein was right all the time.

[1] https://youtu.be/NIk_0AW5hFU