We have gotten better at working as a group. The standard model is a tour de force. It was a collaborative effort over decades but is a lot more complex than anything Einstein did. To some extent we haven’t gotten new physics since then because of reality - we have built higher energy experiments but haven’t got new results.

But my reply was I guess implicitly assuming the post I was replying to was talking about the median level of critical thinking. Your reply is talking about the peaks of creative accomplishment which is not what I was addressing.

Not a good argument. Those were big names because they were (co)founders of major fields. Physics and CS aren’t like fashion where you can come out with a new color or design every six months.

You also seem to be restricting yourself to pop science knowledge of who’s made breakthroughs. That’s because our collective understanding of physics has become much more detailed, to the point where it starts to lose the ability to be meaningfully comprehensible to the average layperson.

Consider AdS/CFT, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdS/CFT_correspondence

There’ve been many major developments just in that area since the early 1970s, to through the late 90s all the way to 2019 (the island formula), with many major contributors like Bekenstein, ‘t Hooft, Susskind, Maldacena, and many less well-known names.

If you resurrected some of the scientists you mentioned, they’d have a lot of work to do to catch up, and making field-changing major breakthroughs would be just as difficult for them as for anyone else alive today.

Something similar is true in CS. There’s been plenty of progress in all fields of CS, but similar to the situation with physics, its nature is not as simple as what the founders of the field were dealing with, so there’s less awareness of it outside the field. Just to pick one small example, Conor McBride’s insight that the derivative of a regular type is the type of its one-hole context ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34358663 ) is beautiful and kind of amazing, but not a result that you’re going to hear much about outside of PhD programs and the like. CS is chock-full of such work. The entire field of programming language theory has come a long, long way since Turing and Von Neumann’s time, to pick a broader example.