This is exactly the mindset that holds science back. While we often romanticize the idea of the eccentric genius who has some brilliant eureka moment and revolu

This is exactly the mindset that holds science back. While we often romanticize the idea of the eccentric genius who has some brilliant eureka moment and revolutionizes a field, such instances are an incredibly small minority of scientific progress. Every once and again there is indeed a paradigm shift that opens up a new area of knowledge to explore, but then there are decades of methodical effort actually exploring that space. A small improvement in one area can be used to make a more precise measurement in another, which in turn gives further insight to some third thing. And ultimately, while we might not give out nobel prizes for something as "mundane" as a mild refinement to semiconductor manufacturing or drug synthesis, the value to society of any such development might be many billions of dollars. High risk, high reward moonshots might sound like an appealing alternative to the current strategy of methodical investigation, after all it's just a numbers game and a you only need a few wins to justify many attempts. But unfortunately it does more harm than good. A single experiment without the context to interpret the data it yields or the commitment to refine its operation is not going to lead to new understanding. Unless you were incredibly lucky and just happened to set everything up right to strike gold on the first try, odds are you will see nothing and convince people that therefore there is nothing of interest to be gained by continued pursuit. In analogy to actually prospecting, you're much more likely to hit paydirt by taking the time to study an area's geology and identifying good spots to dig than digging holes in the ground at random. Finally, the very premise that scientific stagnation is a problem we need to deal with is shaky. While it is very difficult to quantify scientific progress, various proxies like numbers of papers published, numbers of subdisciplines spun off, number of patents filed, etc all seem to indicate that progress not only is ongoing but has been steadily accelerating. While the change in our understanding of the world from any one discovery might be less and less, there are so many more possible avenues for discovery than at any other time in history, and each discovery expands our frontiers to expose new opportunities. There is no shortage of scientific inquiry and ideas, the only limit is that we have advanced so far that it is becoming hard to find natural phenomena at measurable scales that our models of the world do not already fully explain. We found all the particles of the standard model, we can construct things on atomic scales, genetic engineering has become mundane and protein folding is solved, we have mapped the earth from space with millimeter precision and are in the process of doing the same to other worlds, we can accurately simulate airflows at hypersonic speeds and the cores of collapsing stars. Most of these achievements would have been gibberish a mere century ago, and the achievements yet to come will be just as unimaginable to us if not more so.