Most Nobel winners get their prizes during their 60s-70s. It means that people who graduated in the 1970s are just starting to get their Nobels.
And the trend of aging winners continues as research become more complex and specialized and therefore requires more experience. The time between theory and the practical discovery (Nobel prizes are only for the latter) increase as experiments become more complex too. So much that it may become difficult for theorists to get a Nobel in their lifetime. That LK99 thing, if real, is more the exception than the rule.
True. That's why we probably need another mechanism for incentivizing high-risk/high-reward/multi-decennial research. Perhaps, even if LK99 is not real, something interesting will mutate out of it: some kind of platform merging arXiv, Twitch, Patreon, making the researchers to be more transparent, more willing to share partial results, failures, and even be rewarded to fail. Some time ago had this "fail database" in mind, where one would upload all the data of the experiments that didn't work. I see there is a "FailCon" [1].
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