Everything nowadays is a smaller, faster, colder, more complex version of something already predicted to exist last century. We need more Einsteins, Von Neumans, Heavisides etc to kick applied technology in the pants, throw in a whole new paradigm, and open up truly new frontiers other than an atom-sized transistor
Einstein’s three miracle papers of 1905 depended on the idea that photons and electrons were particles, which was a heresy within German physics at the time.
It’s a good thing that he was a patent clerk instead of a physicist and that his reasoning was rock solid and backed by experimental results.