Indeed, although some of this is the luck of timing. E.g. Richard Feynman would likely have been one of the great names in quantum mechanics ... if it weren't for the fact he was 8 years old right then. Linus Pauling, born 17 years earlier, became the 20th century's most preeminent chemist in part because he was a fricking genius and writer (many of his books are still useful today), but key was that also in 1926 he got a Guggenheim Fellowship to study under some European physicists like Bohr and Schrödinger for a couple of years, and was therefore one of the first to apply quantum mechanics to chemistry, a very fruitful approach.
One of the interesting things in http://businessinnovation.berkeley.edu/WilliamsonSeminar/jon... is the graphs and comments on quantum mechanics - everyone involved got degrees and did their Nobel-worth work astonishingly young. The 'bag of jewels' metaphor really is apt, because it seems you had only to be young and flexible-minded to do groundbreaking work. There will probably never again be a period of such riches in physics (he said in 2013, more than a century after Planck's quanta).
In the late 19th century, many physicists thought they had physics pretty well sewn up, with just a few loose ends. Of course it turns out that those loose ends led to quantum mechanics and relativity, completely revolutionizing the field.
Today it seems that physics has most things pretty well figured out, but there are the loose ends of dark matter and dark energy. We don't know exactly what they are, but they seem to make up almost 95% of the content of the universe! So there might still be a chance for another wholesale revolution or two in physics.
I think the point is that Feynman came later to contribute to Quantum Electrodynamics, the "first theory where full agreement between quantum mechanics and special relativity is achieved."*
Feyman was too young for the really fundamental work on quantum mechanics. He won his Nobel prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics. However, he created the path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics, which can be thought of as another way of describing quantum mechanics.
Yes, echoing the others Feynman was too late for the foundational, completely change your view of the universe stuff.
Gamow's Thirty Years that Shook Physics: The Story of Quantum Theoryhttp://www.amazon.com/Thirty-Years-that-Shook-Physics/dp/048... is the standard non-specialist account of this, it starts with Plank right after the turn of the century and is essentially complete in 3 decades, about when Feynman was in high school and teaching himself serious math.
It's less the size and more the breadth. A lot of people in sciences now feel like the "big discoveries" have been made (at least until the next paradigm shift comes along) and all we can do now is an incremental grind in some highly specific area.
Reading Dirac's table of contents is like reading the chapter headings in my undergrad quantum physics textbook. The thing is though, he's actually responsible for a lot of it!
