I think it has more to do with the idea that the days of “low hanging fruit” are over, and that to make any scientific achievements, lots of teamwork is necessary.
When you consider that General Relativity might have been that last piece of “low hanging fruit” in physics, that really puts things into perspective. General Relativity is so vastly complicated and difficult to understand that even most physicists find it difficult.
Scientific discoveries these days are even more complicated and specialized than this, so that anyone who earns a Nobel prize in Chemistry or Physics definitely deserves it, but they are never going to become icons because what they have discovered will have no emotional resonance with average people.
Are you seriously comparing Dean Kamen to Thomas Edison?
Name one thing Dean Kamen’s ever invented that people actually use. Okay, SOME people have ridden a Segway, but not many. It’s a rare novelty. Why would people care about the inventor of nothing they use?
Similarly, what has Elon Musk invented? He’s a successful entrepreneur, but I can’t think of something he’s invented people who know about.
Darwin was somewhat reclusive and conducted a good deal of his work through correspondence. The internet might have been a huge boon to him. He might have been even bigger in his lifetime.
The internet does its level best to tear down anyone with a name. It doesn’t make much difference if they are contemporary or not.
Darwin and Einstein were paradigm shifters. Darwin crushed creationism (and arguably Christianity, in the sense of it is based on the concept of original sin) and gave a new definition of who/why we are, moving the meaning and nature of life away from religion/philosophy and putting it in biology. Einstein showed that space, time, matter and energy work in an interconnected way we didn’t suspect and are not static the way we perceive them.
I don’t know what kinds of paradigm shifts that reshape how we view ourselves and the world are occurring now. Even if they are, like the OP says in the age of celebrity media would we even care?
Plus with science being so advanced, concepts like the ones Einstein and Darwin promoted are over the heads of most of us. I don’t understand the math of relativity, but I understand the concept. I’m guessing even the concepts of a lot of new discoveries is over my head.
Maybe Ray Kurzweil. I know he totally changed my POV of life and human nature. But he isn’t on the caliber of Einstein or Darwin.
I understand it’s completely faddish to blast Edison and has been since about 2006, but, really.
Jobs’ career and Edison’s are completely different. Jobs wasn’t an inventor, nor did he ever claim to be. Notwithstanding claims as to the “authorship” of various inventions (that’s another thread), the things attributed to Edison (lights, recorded sound, motion pictures) are vastly more influential than those attributed to Jobs (Macintosh interface, iPod/Phone/Pad).
As far as inventing goes, Steve Jobs was a ruthless editor. He didn’t invent things, or even design things, but he made people go back to the drawing board again and again until they had developed products that met his standards.
And with all due respect to colonial, Hawking is probably the only physicist working today who couldn’t tie Einstein’s shoelaces.
Einstein probably never bothered, though; I mean look at his hair.
When Edison was quite young, before he had a lab, he invented a new ticker tape machine. That’s how he got the money to do the other things. Whatever his influence was on the later inventions, he definitely invented lots of things by himself.