Greatest work of physicist done in their 20s?

[zoobyshoe]

All of these people either had no math education at 25 or were seen as mediocre, but turned out to be ground breaking.

But I went through each example and showed that all but one had a math education before 25 and none but one was singled out as mediocre.

 

[DiracPool]

I think people are losing sight of the spirit of this thread. It's difficult to argue that the thousands of professional physicists employed by the worlds' universities don't make important contributions to science. They obviously do or they wouldn't be employed.

The distinction I think though, again, being made by the OP, is the qualitative nature of these contributions. In my mind they are what one may refer to as "evolutionary" contributions, meaning that are relatively modest advances on the, pardon the cliche, existing paradigm of the art.

Truly "revolutionary" advances or "quantum leaps" are not typically pioneered by peoples over, say, 30 or 35.

Shrodinger is not a good example. Heisenberg, Einstien, Planck, DeBroglie, and Dirac had already done the pioneering work in QM before he developed his equation, beautiful as it was (and still is). However, all he really did was apply the Hamiltonian to the wave equation and follow the logic. Heisenberg and Dirac had already pioneered the core concetual revolution with their matrix model.

 

[ImaLooser]

Here's what I'm saying: no one ever picked up their first physics book at age 25 and went on to do something great in physics. No one ever started learning their first musical instrument at age 25 and went on to become a virtuoso. No one ever learned to read and write at 25 and went on to write the great American novel. When people do remarkable things all the important training and learning for that happened before 25. This is not some controversial cranky opinion of mine. It's universally understood to be true. It's why we send people to school as kids and don't wait till they're 20.

This interests me too. Someone did start golf at a late age (35?) and make the PGA tour, though I don't recall the name. So it can be done. A retired farmer learned to climb at the 5.13c grade, which is hard to believe, but he did it. Nobody really knows what the limits are, so why worry about it?

 

[zoobyshoe]

This interests me too. Someone did start golf at a late age (35?) and make the PGA tour, though I don't recall the name. So it can be done. A retired farmer learned to climb at the 5.13c grade, which is hard to believe, but he did it. Nobody really knows what the limits are, so why worry about it?

Odds against starting something late in life and getting anywhere with it are heavily against. Of course you can find exceptions to anything. I'm afraid people tend to identify with the exceptions and falsely suppose they can break their own patterns and surge later in life. The golfer and climber were almost certainly already doing something by the age of 25 that could be plugged into what they later excelled at.