Postcards From the Edge

The public face of scientific genius tends to be old and graying. We think of Albert Einstein’s disheveled mop, Charles Darwin’s majestic beard, Isaac Newton’s wrinkled visage–not to mention the balding luminaries who accept their Nobel Prizes in Stockholm each December. Yet the truth is that the breakthroughs that fire our imagination and change our lives are usually made by men and women who are still in their 30s or 40s–and that includes Einstein, Newton and Darwin. It’s no surprise, really; younger scientists are less invested than their elders in the intellectual dogma of the day. They question authority instinctively. They don’t believe it when they’re told a new idea is crazy, so they’re free to do the impossible.

To get a preview of the unsettling truths science will be uncovering in this new century, then, it makes sense to look at young researchers in the most creative phase of their careers, when formal education is complete but eminence still hovers indistinctly in the future. Scientific insiders already know who the edgiest young thinkers are, and now you can meet some of them as well: a biologist looking in scalding-hot springs for clues to the origin of life; an astrophysicist searching for evidence of the “antigravity” force that Einstein once dismissed; a neuroscientist studying how the brain, despite what all the textbooks said, can grow new cells. The impact of their work may not be fully appreciated for decades, if not longer. But then you could have said the same about an obscure patent clerk and his crackpot theory of relativity almost exactly a century ago.

–By Michael D. Lemonick

For more on the Innovators, go to time.com