tl;dr: There are no "Great Men" in science (like Eisenstein, Newton and Galileo) because everyone used previous work, and had highly competent rival scholars wo

tl;dr: There are no "Great Men" in science (like Eisenstein, Newton and Galileo) because everyone used previous work, and had highly competent rival scholars working on the same problems. If one would have been "thrown under a tram" another would have produced the same results soon after. I find this a bit superficial: If only one person can do something, s/he is great. If there are only two, both are not great. We have some redundancy of greatness, but not a lot: If you'd thrown the top 10 physicists in the world under a tram, at any moment in time, progress would suffer greatly. Bonus fact: There are about 100 recorded runners who have ever ran 100m in under 10s. While that achievement is now considered "mundane", I find all 100 of them Great.