Editorial : on age and legal genius

Abstract

Science’s most famous cat was an oddity. Not only did she have the formidable capacity to be both dead and alive when put in a box with radioactive material, her master Erwin Schrödinger was, even at the tender age of 38, thought much too old to have ‘created’ her in the first place.1 Theoretical physics was a young man’s game at the beginning of the 20th century. Heisenberg was 25 when formulating the uncertainty principle, Einstein published his work on the photoelectric effect at 26, Bohr proposed the model of the hydrogen atom when 28. Quantum mechanics lived by the maxim: ‘a person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of thirty will never do so’.