[silverquiet]

Absurd isn't really the word I would use. I think it's more of a naive/common misconception about how science advances. People tend to think of a single genius making breakthroughs when in fact a lot of ideas were building on prior work and in collaboration with others; essentially the ideas eventually have their time, and you get a sense that the specific people who discovered them, while impressive, are a bit of a historical detail rather than an essential ingredient. To me, the biggest example would be evolution - Darwin was famous for it, but you will find others speculating about it before him, and famously he sat on his work and only published it once Alfred Russel Wallace was about to independently publish his discovery of the same phenomena

"Connections" by James Burke is a wonderful documentary that first helped me to really understand this.