Not sure the eras comparable. One _could_ argue that the earlier discoveries were lower hanging fruit, where it was possible for a single brilliant soul to come

Not sure the eras comparable. One _could_ argue that the earlier discoveries were lower hanging fruit, where it was possible for a single brilliant soul to come up with a new concept. Now it seems to require more and more collaboration. That said, since the 60s much of the physics landscape has changed. Postulation and discovery of dark energy and evidence of dark matter, of the Higgs boson and the tau neutrino, the incredible LIGO and JWST projects, discovery of graphene, quantum computation in its entirety, topological insulators, memristors, and the entire array of body imaging techniques (MRI, CT) ...