Humans sure love this story. A dozen Founding Fathers created the United States. A dozen physicists invented quantum mechanics. A dozen innovators caused the Industrial Revolution. It's always wrong.

Ask any of those dozen people where they got their ideas and (if they're honest) they'll each have another dozen people to name, and so on. Ask them who made minor contributions and suggestions and they'll again have dozens of people to name. Science is an ever-expanding body of work that always builds on its past successes and it's the height of naivete to reduce humanity's effort in a subject down to its few most visible people. It makes for good stories and trivia questions, but it's extremely far from the actual truth.

And even if it were true: how could you possibly identify those dozen people beforehand? It'd be like walking into a publishing house and proclaiming that everyone there is stupid because they waste all this money on books that don't end up best-sellers. Why don't they just only invest in the future best-sellers? Are they stupid?

>> For example that list in the case of quantum mechanics was Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, and Erwin Schrödinger.

Those were not the only people working in that field at the time. Not by a long shot. In order to have pioneers in a field, there has to BE a field with a bunch of people in it.