2026·Under36丨The generation that bypasses the old answers

Why are disruptive breakthroughs always accomplished by young people? Because they have not been tamed by the old paradigm. Almost everyone who creates a new paradigm and completes a fundamental invention has something similar: they are either young enough, or they have just entered the field that they are about to rewrite. In 1962, the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn made this observation in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He was talking about physical science: Copernicus was less than forty when he proposed the heliocentric theory, Newton was twenty-three when he invented calculus, and Einstein was twenty-six when he published the special theory of relativity. The question Kuhn was trying to answer was, why are disruptive breakthroughs always accomplished by young people? The answer is simple and cruel, because they have not been tamed by the old paradigm. After sorting out the information of the 2026 Under 36 inductees, it is difficult not to think of this judgment: the new paradigm does not rely on convincing the old people, but on rewriting by a new generation. It is undeniable that the spotlight of business narrative has shifted from those “who see the gaps” to “those who master the technology”. The weapons of business used to be intuition, speed, and a sense of user pain points. They are still valid, but another set of entrepreneurial grammar has been overlaid. Now, more and more people are entering the poker table with papers, models, experimental data, hardware drawings and industrial customers. Entrepreneurship is no longer just a competition of business sense, but also a battle of migration speed of knowledge structure. And most of them are just young enough. The Collapse of Business Jet Lag Always Rewards Young People The time gap between academic training and entrepreneurship is being compressed dramatically. Ten years ago, if a scientist wanted to start a business, the common path was to complete a PhD, do a postdoc for a few years, gain experience in a large company, and then go to work around the age of 40. This path is being rewritten. “Papers” that once required lengthy translation can now be quickly commercialized. The paper results published by Kimi's Yang Zhilin directly shaped the technical trend of subsequent large language models. Xia Lixue of Wuwen Xinqiong has been ranked among the top 2% scientists in Stanford's global disciplines for five consecutive years. Zhang Linfeng of Shenzhen Technology used AI to rewrite the upper limit of efficiency of molecular dynamics simulation. This is a more intense kind of entrepreneurship