New Delhi, Nov. 7: Two economists in the US have shown that Albert Einstein was wrong about one thing: the age at which scientists perform their greatest feats.

Einstein, who had published his own pioneering Nobel Prize-winning work at age 26, had said a scientist who hasn’t made a great contribution to science before 30 will never do so.

Now economists Bruce Weinberg at the Ohio State University and Benjamin Jones at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University have shown that while great scientific achievements did occur before age 30 in the early years of the 20th century, peak scientific creativity at young ages has become increasingly rare.

Their findings will appear on Tuesday in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers examined Nobel Prizes for science between 1900 and 2008, analysing the ages at which each of 182 physicists, 153 chemists and 190 medical scientists achieved their award-winning feats.

Their study, the first to explore how the age of peak scientific creativity has changed over time, has shown that in the early years of the 20th century, about 20 per cent of scientists had done their prize-winning work before the age of 30 years.

But by the early 21st century, none of the prize-winners had done their work before 30. The proportion of physicists and chemists who did prize-winning work before turning 40 also dropped over the past century.

The economists believe these trends reflect an increasingly longer time that scientists require to build on already existing foundational knowledge to achieve ground-breaking work in the frontiers of their fields.

“The shoulders of giants appear higher and higher as the volume of foundational knowledge expands. So climbing the backs of giants is taking longer and longer,” Jones, associate professor of management and strategy at the Kellogg School, told The Telegraph.

The changing age of peak creativity also appears to be influenced by the domain and nature of work. The study suggests that ground-breaking theoretical work is associated with relatively younger scientists, while great experimental work is achieved at older ages, Jones said.

“So much stuff has accumulated in (scientific) fields that it takes an increasingly longer time (for a scientist) to learn all that knowledge and then make an important contribution to the field,” said Weinberg, professor of economics at the Ohio State University.

The researchers point out that a distinct shift towards youthful achievements in physics occurred during the early decades of the 20th century in the field of quantum mechanics, a largely theoretical branch of physics that brought in novel, revolutionary ideas that broke away from existing foundations.

Among quantum mechanics pioneers were the physicists Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, and Paul Dirac, each of whom contributed to the field in his mid-20s. The 20th-century Indian theoretical physicist Satyendra Nath Bose also made his greatest contributions to quantum mechanics in his mid-20s.

“Quantum mechanics back then was a new and highly conceptual area and its development required relatively few pieces of existing foundational knowledge,” Jones said.

The researchers say the observed changes in age of peak creativity appear consistent with the idea that abstract contributions are more likely to emerge at a younger age than experimental contributions, which rely more heavily on accumulated knowledge.

“In the United States and other countries where the research workforce is ageing, the concept that great scientific achievements may occur even at older ages will be reassuring,” Weinberg said.