Laureates are getting old
BBC told about the aging of Nobel laureates
Alexander Khramov, Infox.ru
Journalists have found out why people are becoming Nobel Prize laureates in increasingly advanced years, reports Infox. It turned out that it was all about the increased number of scientists.
This is stated in the material published by the BBC.
This year, the average age of the Nobel Prize laureates (not counting the Nobel laureates in Economics and Literature, which will be announced on October 10 and 13) was 72 years, the youngest of them is 65 years old.
However, earlier people received the Nobel Prize in much less advanced years – during the first half of the XX century, the average age of laureates was 56 years, and the average age of physicists awarded the prize was 47 years at all.
Since the 1950s, the rapid aging of laureates began: the average age of natural scientists, who were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics, chemistry, physiology and medicine, has increased especially greatly. The age of the Nobel Prize laureates in Economics and Literature has not grown so much, and among the figures awarded the Peace Prize, it has even become somewhat smaller.
Most likely, the aging of the laureates is due to increased competition. According to Gustav Kalstrand, curator of the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, the number of physicists in the world has increased from 1,000 to almost 1,000 in a century. "The waiting time for the prize has become longer, and it is almost never awarded immediately after an important discovery," Kalstrad explained.
For example, in the 1930s, Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac were almost immediately awarded the prize for discoveries in the field of quantum physics when they were only 31 years old. Today, young scientists also often make breakthroughs, but their colleagues do the same, so the queue for the Nobel Prize is getting longer.
Many scientists simply do not live to see the award – for example, this year the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for the discovery of the Berezinsky-Kosterlitz-Taules transition. But one of the three scientists whose name appears in the name of this effect, Soviet physicist Vadim Berezinsky, died back in 1980, so the award bypassed him.
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10.10.2016