Is this why science advances one funeral at a time?

A huge new study looked at the careers of more than 12 million scientists and landed on a spicy conclusion: younger researchers are more likely to blow up old ideas, while older ones get better at linking existing ideas together. The article uses Einstein as the poster child — dazzling the world in his 20s, then later becoming a famous skeptic of the quantum revolution. In plain English: early career = shock the system, late career = tidy up the map.

But the real fireworks were in the comments, where readers instantly pushed back on the article’s neat little story. One camp basically said, “Hold on, this is not just old people getting stubborn.” Commenter Animats argued Einstein didn’t fail because he got old; he failed because uniting gravity and quantum theory is still one of the hardest problems in science. Another crowd went even sharper, dragging in the deliciously shady idea of “Nobel Disease” — the tendency for some prize-winning geniuses to later wander into wild, eyebrow-raising theories. “Sounds disruptive to me…” one reader joked.

Then came the system-is-broken faction, and they were not subtle. One commenter claimed truly bold work doesn’t win grants anymore — safe, buzzword-friendly research does. Translation: maybe scientists aren’t getting less daring with age; maybe the machine rewards caution. Add in a Douglas Adams quote, a Kuhn name-drop, and a lot of “this says more about institutions than aging,” and suddenly this wasn’t just about science. It was about power, prestige, and whether groundbreaking ideas die of old age — or paperwork.