This used to be true for scientists too, 100 or more years ago.
Body of human knowledge is much bigger now-a-days. It takes 4 yrs honors and first 1/2 yrs in PhD to even begin thinking about fundamental research. That number is likely higher for some other fields (like doctors I guess).
>Body of human knowledge is much bigger now-a-days
that's what Einstein' contemporaries could have said as well.
The growing body of human knowledge is increasingly noise, bad or redundant theories, with entire gigantic fields based on wrong assumptions and fueled by groupthink and premature optimization, just like 100 or 500 years ago. Deep specialization is not always helpful and often detrimental for fundamental research as it assumes deep indoctrination into consensus theory of the day.
Thinking about fundamental research can start once one learns the fundamentals which doesn't take more than a few years in a breadth-first search manner. You don't have to cover all the branches of that giant tree, some of the branches don't have a right to exist in the first place and some are incredibly redundant or marginal improvements of the core parent idea.
I think redundancy and noise have definitely increased because more people are involved in research. So the only think that might be harder now vs. 100 years ago is filtering signal from noise. But the internet, and the rise of search engines is actually pretty helpful with that.
