[burntoutfire]

> It takes smart and dedicated individuals relatively a lot of funding and time (see mRNA vaccines or the blue LED story), but it's not exactly the same as coming up with Maxwell's equation out of thin air.

Who says there are no more breakthrough to conjure out of the thin air?

[pas]

There certainly are, but the later part of my comment tries to address this by illustrating how nothing is really "out of thin air" (still, the creative jumps from data/knowledge/premises/broken-models to a new hypothesis/better-models are invaluable, and almost always there's a prerequisite of years/decades of hard work to familiarize oneself with the data/old-models on such a level that the insight required for the jump basically comes intuitively "duh just try this, or that, or this helps to fit the data better" - which of course is intuitive to no one else, who did not put in those years).