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peacemaker @ 12:06 am: For instance, Simonton and others have shown that physicists tend to make their most important discovery before the age of 30, which is why they morbidly joke that if they haven't done Nobel-worthy work before they get married, they might as well quit the field. (The only field that peaks before physics is poetry, with an ideal creative age of 21.) Simonton argues that young physicists and poets mostly benefit from their innocence, ignorance and naivete. Because they haven't become "encultured," weighted down with false assumptions and tedious obligations, they're more willing to rebel against the status-quo. (Simonton rejects the obvious alternative explanation, which is that the creative decline is due to age-related cognitive decline. After all, some academic fields, such as literary criticism, have a peak creative age in the late forties.)
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While physics, math and poetry are dominated by brash youth, many other fields are more amenable to middle age. (Simonton's list includes domains such as "novel writing, history, philosophy, medicine".) He argues that these fields show a very different creative curve, with a "a leisurely rise giving way a comparatively late peak, in the late 40s or even 50s chronologically, with a minimal if not largely absent drop-off afterward." (These differences are also cross-cultural: for instance, the age gap between the creative peaks for poets and novelists has been found in every major literary tradition across the world, with novelists getting wise and poets getting stale.)
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What accounts for these stark differences in peak creative age? One possibility is that they are caused by intrinsic features of the academic disciplines. As Simonton notes, those disciplines with an "intricate, highly articulated body of domain knowledge," such as physics, chess and poetry, tend to encourage youthful productivity. In contrast, fields that are more loosely defined, in which the basic concepts are ambiguous and unclear - examples include biology, philosophy and lit crit - lead to later peak productive ages. Furthermore, the peak of all intellectuals seems to be getting postponed, as the increasing complexity of research in general requires increased time to master. In 1500, the peak of creative output was 25; by 1960, it was 37.