>>14092536My guess:
1) All the "easy" stuff has already been discovered. There was a time when if you were smart and were moderately wealthy you could design a cutting edge scientific instrument on your own to test your own brand new hypothesis. You would just need to hire a couple of expert craftsman to produce the tricky components. Also, it would be fairly simple for your peers to make the same instruments to test your claims. With some rare exceptions those days are long past.
2) Most research is done by sizable teams of researchers these days, in part because the equipment tends to be so expensive. So even when important stuff is discovered it is difficult to credit these discoveries to any single person.
3) Most research is painfully specialized these days, to the point that it is very difficult to explain to the layman why some new discovery might be important except through cringe inducing clickbait sensationalist articles that ignore the actual details to the point of basically lying.
4) It is easiest to see which people/discoveries were most influential long after the fact. Similar to how old media tends to look better than current media of the same type because all the mediocrity has been forgotten and only the old stuff that actually stood out is remembered.
