This is one of the critical details: Still, there is hope. “New ideas sometimes serve as revolutions,” Jones and Weinberg comment. Revolutions tend to favor th

This is one of the critical details: Still, there is hope. “New ideas sometimes serve as revolutions,” Jones and Weinberg comment. Revolutions tend to favor the young. The average age-at-discovery, in physics, took a dip at the beginning of the century. This is where Einstein came in, who published his general theory of relativity at 26, and Dirac, who wrote the “fever chill” poem. They attribute this to the impact of quantum mechanics at the beginning of the century, when “the entire worldview of physics changed” There's a highly recommended books, Thirty Years that Shook Physics: The Story of Quantum Theory (http://www.amazon.com/Thirty-Years-that-Shook-Physics/dp/048624895X http://www.amazon.com/Thirty-Years-that-Shook-Physics/dp/048...) that in part explains what's happened in the last century and a quarter or so. That amazing 30 years of course produced a rash of Nobels, and in the other Nobel fields then enabled further Noble research, e.g. the 20th Century's preeminent chemist, Linus Pauling, got his Ph.D. at an opportune time for him to do his postdoc work in Europe, and then apply the developing quantum theory to his field. Molecular genetics, particularly the elucidation of DNA, also resulted in a truly wild ride for a few decades, something I got a feel of when I started doing it in 1977. Now, a lot of scientists are in Feynman's position, in a time where there's lots of known stuff out there, but achievable Nobel worthy research is less obvious to everyone, including those awarding the prizes.