Are Ortega and Newton mutually exclusive? Isn't the case much more likely that both:

- Significant advances by individuals or small groups (the Newtons, Einsteins, or Gausses of the world), enable narrowly-specialized, incremental work by "average" scientists, which elaborate upon the Great Advancement...

- ... And then those small achievements form the body of work upon which the next Great Advancement can be built?

Our potential to contribute -- even if you're Gauss or Feynman or whomever -- is limited by our time on Earth. We have tools to cheat death a bit when it comes to knowledge, chief among which are writing systems, libraries of knowledge, and the compounding effects of decades or centuries of study.

A good example here might be Fermat's last theorem. Everyone who's dipped their toes in math even at an undergraduate level will have at least heard about it, and about Fermat. People interested in the problem might well know that it was proven by Andrew Wiles, who -- almost no matter what else he does in life -- will probably be remembered mainly as "that guy who proved Fermat's last theorem." He'll go down in history (though likely not as well-known as Fermat himself).

But who's going to remember all the people along the way who failed to prove Fermat? There have been hundreds of serious attempts over the four-odd centuries that the theorem had been around, and I'm certain Wiles had referred to their work while working on his own proof, if only to figure out what doesn't work.

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There's another part to this, and that's that as our understanding of the world grows, Great Advancements will be ever more specialized, and likely further and further removed from common knowledge.

We've gone from a great advancement being something as fundamental as positing a definition of pi, or the Pythagorean theorem in Classical Greece; to identifying the slightly more abstract, but still intuitive idea that white light is a combination of all other colours on the visible spectrum and that the right piece of glass can refract it back into its "components" during the Renaissance; to the fundamentally less intuitive but no less groundbreaking idea of atomic orbitals in the early 20th century.

The Great Advancements we're making now, I struggle to understand the implications of even as a technical person. What would a memristor really do? What do we do with the knowledge that gravity travels in waves? It's great to have solved n-higher-dimensional sphere packing for some two-digit n... but I'll have to take you at your word that it helps optimize cellular data network topology.

The amount of context it takes to understand these things requires a lifetime of dedicated, focused research, and that's to say nothing of what it takes to find applications for this knowledge. And when those discoveries are made and their applications are found, they're just so abstract, so far removed from the day-to-day life of most people outside of that specialization, that it's difficult to even explain why it matters, no matter what a quantum leap that represents in a given field.