Originally Posted by Nik
I think what I am trying to say though is that in addition to the lack of "virgin territory", or maybe because of it, fewer people have opportunities to discover anything exciting for themselves since everything is all explained to them from an early age.

I wonder if there's still lots of virgin territory. The difference now is that you have to know a lot in order to get there.

I also think that it's easier in hindsight to see how much stuff there was to discover. The great questions of 1900 probably seemed as difficult to the scientists of the day as the questions of 2011 do to scientists now.