It all depends on scope of time and your depth of knowledge. The closer you are to any innovation the less it looks like revolution and the more like evolution. I mean, at your level of detail, the Wright Brothers didn't do anything extraordinary, just applied well-known and proven laws of nature to create more lift than the weight of a man. Yet, as any schoolchild knows, they invented the airplane.
Couple this with the fact that research in the past half-century has been conducted more and more by large teams of scientists and engineers, where inter-communication is required, and it is even easier to see the path from Point A to Point B without having to acknowledge any individual as a genius. Thus, if you are close to the process, you don't get the "Wow!" slap in the face that you would get if you looked away for a month and then were presented with the final product.
Final thought: We have become so accustomed to *constant* innovation that we tend to only notice when it has ceased! Moore's Law is not a law of stagnation, but rather one of assumed dramatic innovation! The mere fact that it remains largely assumed proves that there continues to be massive innovation!
BTW, non-bio tech examples: Flash memory, IBM MicroDrive, cheap digital photography, GHz+ processor speeds (which according to many rags a few years ago were physically impossible even with die-shrinkage), home networking without wires, hybrid low-emmision vehicles, etc.
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Couple this with the fact that research in the past half-century has been conducted more and more by large teams of scientists and engineers, where inter-communication is required, and it is even easier to see the path from Point A to Point B without having to acknowledge any individual as a genius. Thus, if you are close to the process, you don't get the "Wow!" slap in the face that you would get if you looked away for a month and then were presented with the final product.
Final thought: We have become so accustomed to *constant* innovation that we tend to only notice when it has ceased! Moore's Law is not a law of stagnation, but rather one of assumed dramatic innovation! The mere fact that it remains largely assumed proves that there continues to be massive innovation!
BTW, non-bio tech examples: Flash memory, IBM MicroDrive, cheap digital photography, GHz+ processor speeds (which according to many rags a few years ago were physically impossible even with die-shrinkage), home networking without wires, hybrid low-emmision vehicles, etc.