That's not necessarily true, and I'd be incredibly worried if it were true. I think it's more an artifact of the design of this version of 'science' as an institution.

Freeman Dyson was a brilliant drop out mathematician who happened to meet Richard Feynman and demonstrated a proof for Feynman's work (which led him to winning a Nobel). He says,

"I think it's almost true without exception if you want to win a Nobel Prize, you should have a long attention span, get hold of some deep and important problem and stay with it for ten years. That wasn't my style."

Here's a list of Dyson's awards: Heineman Prize (1965), Lorentz Medal (1966), Hughes Medal (1968), Harvey Prize (1977), Wolf Prize (1981), Andrew Gemant Award (1988), Matteucci Medal (1989), Oersted Medal (1991), Fermi Award (1993), Templeton Prize (2000), Pomeranchuk Prize (2003), Poincaré Prize (2012).

I think it's in fact very true and there is a very good reason what that is the case.

Most expert know more and more about less and less because in order to understand something you need to dig ever deeper to understand the specifics.

What is needs is expert generalists that are able to understand several fields well enough to see where knowledge from one area can lead to understanding in others and vice versa.

Expert generalists are precisely the thing that's missing, especially with how younger scientists are trained. It's harder to fund an expert generalist.

Freeman Dyson is a great example because at 89 he published the solution to the prisoner's dilemma, decades later than the original theoretical physics work.

The Ph.D. process weeds out anyone who has any desire to become an expert generalist.

> the solution to the PD

Dyson truly proposes a great solution lying in PD. That is a huge oversight for game theorists when they let an outsider do that.

However, it's not the ultimate solution. It's an extremely interesting aspect (a strategy, a style of play) of the PD that game theorists somehow have never seen and articulated in maths.

For the evolutionary fitness of the extortioner solution that Dyson discovers:

Evolution of extortion in Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma games http://www.pnas.org/content/110/17/6913.abstract

Exactly!

You don't really understand a field without digging deep. A great example is how much students are willing to trust surveys before and after they do a large one. Another is mice running mazes, the numbers may look nice in theory, but they can hide a lot of problems.

I totally agree but the question is what constitutes a field.

I once read about a whole series of areas where solutions to issues in one field happened from understanding from understanding another field. Unfortunately ver few people span over multiple fields and can call themselves experts.

So the questions is whether we could spread out the expertise to more in between studies and letting go of literature as the only way to collect knowledge might be a great first step.

Honestly, University's or other places where people in diverse fields collaborate seem like the solution to this problem. Because, there are a lot of fields out there and 2^N sucks, but conversations take less effort than a deep dive. Bell labs comes to mind as a private sector version of this.

The problem is that this collaboration does not happen because people are mostly "trapped" within their own field. My point is simply to remove the idea of literature as the container of knowledge as if knowledge is like literature (i.e. once written saved as a piece of knowledge)

Or put another way.

Instead of modeling knowledge after the way our brain best deal with structure we should leave the structuring to the machines and start approaching it more like an organism that can be explored. I think we are bound to see something along those lines soon.

Maybe it worked for him; I have found that people who tend to do the most important work in my field are dedicated and believe in their work, instead of perpetually looking for something new but unimportant to publish.

What was Einstein's single idea that he worked on? The photoelectric effect, for which he won the Nobel prize, or special and general relativity? Or statistical mechanics like Bose-Einstein statistics? Because it seems to me like he worked on many ideas during his life.

the nature of spacetime and gravitation seem to have followed him to his death.

Certainly. But it was not the only idea he worked on, as I commented.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but I interpret "Most of the great scientists worked on a single idea their entire life ..." as working on a single idea, to the exclusion of others.

Otherwise the statement would be "Most of the great scientists worked on an idea their entire life"

FWIW, using the list from http://listverse.com/2009/02/24/top-10-most-influential-scie... :

Marie Curie: received Nobel Prizes in Physics for her work in radiation and in Chemistry for her work in radium and polonium. If the idea here is "radiation" then Einstein's idea was "physics" and Darwin's was "biology"

Alan Turing: died entirely too young. Best known for early work in computers. Then switched to mathematical biology, specifically morphogenesis.

Niels Bohr: perhaps "nature of the atom" or "quantum mechanics"

Max Planck: Black-body radiation and special relativity

Charles Darwin: evolution (not really a small idea)

Leonardo da Vinci: not applicable

Galileo Galilei: astronomy (I can't think of a smaller "idea" for his body of work)

Nikola Tesla: umm, "electricity"?

Albert Einstein: see above

Isaac Newton: optics, gravitation, physics .. and then the Royal Mint, counterfeiting, and a whole lot of alchemy.

It's hard to conclude that these people worked on a single "idea", though some worked mostly in a single field.

Most of these people didn't even work in a single field... Tesla, Newton, Planck, Curie, Turing, Galileo...

Yes, I believe that is my point.

I may have not stated it well, i did not mean an idea to the exclusion of others but rather that they but that they didn't stop working on every single idea they took upon for a long long time. From the list you give, there arent any scientists who put their research on a subject "to bed" , unless it proved a failure.

Umm, Newton? The latter part of his life was research in alchemy and biblical chronology.

If you say that Newton "worked on a single idea [his] entire life", then what was the idea?

In any case, the observation is incomplete. All great scientists slept at least once a month doesn't mean that sleeping at least once a month is a distinctive attribute of great scientists.

If most great scientists work on a given topic all of their scientific career, is that not mostly because most scientists do the same?

That's not true -- not even for Einstein. His work on relativity was arguably his greatest, but remember that he won the Nobel for his work on the photoelectric effect. He also did a lot of work on particle movement, i.e. Brownian motion.