The key to a long life is challenging work, according to 96-year-old Nobel Prize winning physicist Arthur Ashkin.
Ashkin told Business Insider he heads down to the basement of his Rumson, N.J., home every chance he gets to continue the research he did at Bell Labs until his retirement in 1992.
That work earned him half the Nobel Prize in physics in 2018, recognizing his pivotal role in developing a technology that can levitate tiny objects with lasers.
"My lab is down there," Ashkin told BI about his basement, where he now manufactures tubes from reflective paper and scotch tape that he believes may one day make for a cheap solar-energy solution. "I do this many times a day.”
Scientists who've studied so-called superagers say they often share Ashkin's curiosity and zeal for problem-solving, BI reported.
"Challenging your brain with mental exercise is believed to activate processes that help maintain individual brain cells and stimulate communication among them," researchers at Harvard Health wrote.
For Ashkin, this means continually questioning what he knows about how light particles operate.
"It's sort of a mysterious particle," he told BI. "When I took quantum mechanics, they said 'It's a wave which is everywhere. It's a particle which is everywhere.'"
In addition to continuing to push your brain, moving your body and eating right can help keep you sharp, too – as well as having a supportive spouse, research has shown, BI reported.
Ashkin and his 86-year-old wife, Aline Ashkin, have been married 64 years
"I really am surprised that at the age of 96 he is so much 'with it' and so brilliant," she said.
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