[throwaway1777]

I’m talking specifically about stuff like the discovery of gravity or electricity, not the very important and significant inventions that aren’t really a step change. The number of people who make these discoveries may even be hundreds or thousands but that is vanishingly small on a planet of billions of people.

[DubiousPusher]

Most academic discoveries come from the same kind of hand-me-down process as practical inventions. Newton's tutor was the one who encouraged him toward studying proto-calculus. He even wrote down the fundamental theorem of calculus himself once but not realizing its importance never publicized it.

[xNeil]

Interesting! I'd appreciate any sources though.

[mattkrause]

Here's a nice example of the "contingency" of scientific success by Bol, de Vaan, and van de Rijt (2018). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1719557115

Grants are reviewed and ranked by a panel of experts. While they often agree in the broad strokes, their scores also have random or subjective components: different reviewers might prefer different approaches; even the same reviewer might give slightly different scores if they re-reviewed a grant (e.g., due to their mood). However, someone eventually does need to set a payline, or threshold for funding.

As a result, you'd expect people who submitted the worst funded grants and the best unfunded grants, which have very similar scores, to have similar career trajectories. After all, their abilities--as measured by grant scores--are virtually indistinguishable. However, the winners go on to win nearly twice as much funding in the next eight years. This presumably reflects the fact that funding begets more funding (you can collect more and better data for subsequent work) and prestige begets more prestige (you've now got another thing to put in the "awards" category).

[derbOac]

This gets even murkier when you consider that grant award and citation statistics are correlated only like 0.3 or something.

It's the Matthew effect multiplied by Goodhart's law.

[DubiousPusher]

For the specific anecdote I mentioned you can read more here

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Barrow

and here

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_calcu...