Novelty and youth go hand in hand: we talk of them in the same breath. This idea, fostered by sales and marketing people, has taken such a hold on the popular imagination in the western market economies that political leaders are now chosen for their youth (if not always their beauty), and top business jobs go to ever-younger candidates. The serious-looking, middle-aged people who used to anchor our news programmes have been replaced by eye-catching young women. So pronounced is the shift - at a time when developed societies are getting older - that governments have been forced to legislate to give the old a chance.
In science, technology and the arts, especially, it is assumed that we must look to the young for new ideas, change and reform. After all, is not youth the time of dissent, of challenging the status quo? The assumption is not unreasonable. But it has been overstated: no biological evidence has been found to support it, and anecdotal evidence throws up too many exceptions to prove the existence of a rule.
The tendency may be exaggerated by our romantic enthusiasm for infant prodigies - poets, musicians, mathematicians - especially if they have the good fortune to die young. A precocious talent suggests genius, and genius a mysterious, even divine, source. Meteoric young Mozart is worshipped while staid old Bach is merely revered, though Bach’s youthful improvisations on the organ shocked his Lutheran congregations. Shelley and Keats, dead by 30, shine more lustrously than old Wordsworth - although it was Wordsworth who was mainly responsible for the Romantic movement.
But are the insouciance and iconoclasm of youth sufficient to bring new ideas into the world? Certainly one expects the young to reject the standards and conventions of the establishment. Young artists want to start again from scratch, get back to basics - minimalist music, primitivist sculpture - or, like the ”Brit artists” with their enthusiasm for excrement, blood and urine, to overturn ”art” altogether.
Tearing down the old, such as Lenin’s Bolsheviks or Mao’s Red Guards, is a lot easier than coming up with the new. Innovation demands more than enthusiasm. Progress in science is not so much revolutionary as incremental. ”You need knowledge before you make a breakthrough,” says Frank James, professor of the history of science at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. ”It is about suddenly recognising that something is important.”
James, who does not like the word ”innovation”, describes the claim that innovators have to be young as ”a nonsense”. ”Galileo didn’t do anything of significance until he was past 40, and Faraday didn’t discover electrical induction until he was older still,” he says.
Occasionally the innocence of youth can work in a scientist’s favour. Thanks to his ignorance of chemical structure, William Perkin discovered the first aniline dye, mauveine, by accident when he was an 18-year-old lab assistant. Newton, like many mathematicians, was an early starter, identifying the spectrum by means of a prism at the age of 24; and Christiaan Huygens invented the pendulum clock at 28.
But it is no surprise to find that most scientific advances were made by people in their 30s and 40s. Ted Hoff was 34 when he invented the microprocessor. The Cambridge mathematician Andrew Wiles completed his proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem (a puzzle he decided to crack when still a boy of 10) at the age of 42. Charles Babbage was a year older when he designed his ”analytical engine”, forerunner of the programmable computer. Alexander Fleming was 47 when he discovered penicillin.
At the age of 50, Gutenberg invented his moveable-type printing press, William Harvey published his treatise on the circulation of the blood, and Darwin was finally ready to publish the theory he had recognised decades earlier on his voyage with the Beagle. And Louis Pasteur was 60 when he discovered a vaccine for anthrax.
Even more telling, perhaps, are the examples of those who took up their subjects late in life. William Herschel, for example, was a music teacher before he turned to astronomy, discovering the planet Uranus at 43, infrared radiation and the asteroids at 62, and continuing to make observations into his 70s.
Innovation in the arts is also part of a cumulative process - call it ”progress”, or not. For example, figurative sculpture moved over thousands of years from the carving of primitive totems, to the archaic formality of early Egyptian and Greek statuary, to the idealised naturalism of Praxiteles and the Hellenistic sculptors, to the hyper-realism of Michelangelo. And then back by degrees, via artists such as Henry Moore - an admirer of Canadian Inuit art - to primitivism again.
Western music has likewise produced some great innovators. But it is easy to see that from the middle ages onwards, composers gradually expanded the ”permissible” harmonic intervals and ”acceptable” dissonances until they reached perfect atonality in the early 20th century. Each composer stood on the shoulders of his predecessor. Mozart may have started young, but he had to learn Haydn’s harmonic structure before he could start breaking the rules. Beethoven had the challenge of Mozart to confront. The Romantics had to absorb Beethoven before giving birth to Wagner. And Wagner was admired by Liszt, who in his old age wrote piano miniatures without key signatures, anticipating the Modernists such as Schoenberg.
In the arts, too, inventiveness can go on into old age. Beethoven’s late string quartets were music for another age. Verdi wrote his best operas at the end of his career: his Otello is often described as his most perfect fusion of drama and music. Cezanne, though he started to break with his contemporaries in his 30s, was more than 60 when he completed his futuristic ”Les Grandes Baigneuses”. Monet gave Impressionism its name with his ”Impression: Soleil Levant”, exhibited in 1872; but it was as a 90-year-old that wrestling with the effects of light and water on his pond at Giverny pushed him into abstractionism.
Literature is full of examples of late vocations: the 19th-century German novelist Theodor Fontane was a chemist before turning to literature, and was nearly 60 before writing the novels that influenced Thomas Mann. Cervantes and Thomas Hobbes both wrote their masterpieces late in life.
The intuitive element of many discoveries reinforces the impression that only the young can be good at invention. Scientific solutions are often associated with an apparently heaven-sent flash of insight - Newton reputedly prompted by the apple’s fall to investigate gravity, for example, or Friedrich August Kekule’s dreaming of a serpent eating its tail to give him the shape of the benzene molecule. Most frequently quoted is the experience of Henri Poincare, who got the answer to an abstruse problem of mathematical functions while climbing on to a bus in Caen. So certain was Poincare of his solution that he settled down to chat with a fellow passenger - they were on a geological field trip - and only bothered to verify it when he got home.
But Poincare’s revelation was the subconscious result not only of weeks and months of thought, but also of years of training and experience. It was the result of that mysterious but familiar process whereby the brain goes on working when the mind’s attention is elsewhere - or what my school physics teacher used to call ”fottling”.
Is there a biological brake on human inventiveness? The number of great scientists and artists that go on performing in old age suggests not. ”Most things attributed to ageing are actually due to illness,” says Raymond Tallis, emeritus professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Manchester, and a former adviser to government. Some functions may suffer, such as short-term memory, and the ability to name sets or make a category changes. But there is no reason to suppose that humans are condemned to eventual sterility by the loss of brain cells. ”How many brain cells do you need?” Tallis asks. ”For all my research in neuroscience, I still don’t know how many brain cells one needs to have a brilliant idea.”
On the other side of the balance, old age brings with it an extended range of reference for people such as artists and novelists. Tallis, who has also published extensively on literary and cultural themes, believes that creativity and innovation are such broad terms as to be merely ”rhetorical”.
So, what are the prerequisites for inventiveness? Youth is not one of them. An exceptional memory is helpful, but a freak ability in, say, mental arithmetic, such as that of the 19th-century wunderkind George Parker Bidder, is no guarantee. Scientists of great originality are often poor students, according to psychologist Professor Liam Hudson, writing in The Oxford Companion to the Mind. Fellows of The Royal Society generally have the same class of university degree as less successful researchers. Nobel prizewinners mostly have the IQ of the average undergraduate; and there is no correlation - above a certain minimum, of course - between IQ and achievement ”in any sphere of adult endeavour studied so far”.
Inventors do seem to belong to a certain type, however. They are self-propelling, questioning and persistent. They need, says The Royal Institution’s James, a ruthless objectivity which resists the pressures of received wisdom or religious dogma. A capacity for free association, even fantasy, is important: Einstein prescribed a lively imagination unfettered by reason or logic. In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler suggests the key is analogy, bringing unrelated ideas together such as a diver who follows an underwater (i.e. subconscious) chain of which only the two ends are visible above the surface.
Why, then, in spite of the evidence, does it seem strange to speak of old innovators? Because there are impediments to creativity in later life, though not the ones we suppose. They are not biological blocks, but psychological or even cultural ones. People get tired or run out of ideas. Or they fall out of fashion as public taste changes. Or, in a society where youth is prized above everything, they lose confidence in their work, feeling that younger people do not wish to hear what they have to say. ”Perhaps,” says Tallis, ”there is a feeling of moving towards closure, that your life is complete, the job is over, like those individuals who don’t go to the doctor because they feel old and undeserving of attention.”
Perhaps in the future there will be other, instrumental, constraints. The computer, like the telescope and the microscope before it, has greatly enlarged the possibilities of scientific research. But will it cripple human ability and imagination at the same time?
”The artist has now an embarras de richesses of media,” says Peter Wood, the theatre and opera director. ”Does he go with the technology or ignore it? Ideas are becoming the servants of the machine: the computer has changed the lives of a whole generation - and we’re still only at the beginning.” Wood, also in his early 80s now, thinks language itself is in danger of being poisoned by the ”toad-like words” of computer lingo. ”We, the older generation, were blessed with people who adored language and indulged themselves in it. But who now could write Gray’s ’Elegy’ or ’Kubla Khan’?”
If that warning is to be taken seriously, perhaps it is time that the old, as Tallis suggests, throw off their psychological inhibitions and re-enter the creative fray. ”The old are free; they have no hope of preferment; they have nothing to lose; and they have nothing to fear but death,” he says. Tallis himself is still only 60 and, taking himself at his own word, is using his retirement to complete his magnum opus, a book exploring the possibilities of human consciousness which he is naming, after a treatise by the medieval scholar Robert Grosseteste, De Luce, ”on light”.
