Standing on the shoulders of giants

On the way into the office this morning I was thinking about all those great people who have given us our understanding of the world. Thales, Aristotle, Archimedes, Eratosthenese, Bacon,De vinci, Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Galilei, Cassini, Huygens, Faraday, Maxwell, Rutherford, Planck, Newton, Einstein, Hubble, Schrodinger, Dirac, Heisenberg, Bhor, Oppenheimer, Feynman..... But wait.. Who comes next? I can name many many who have contributed to our understanding of the universe since 1950 but they are no longer "household names". Mention the pre-1950's names I listed to anyone and they will have heard of them. Mention any of those that have come since, and I bet at least 70% of them will not be in the psyche of those not studying Physics or Astronomy. Why is this? You would think that with modern media and especially, the internet, The names of those related to the major breakthroughs in the Physical Sciences would be more widely known.  Most people, when asked to name a post 1950's Physicist, would probably name Stephen Hawking and that's it. Has the real breakthroughs in understanding the physical world stalled over the past 40 years or have we become so used to hearing about them that we have become immune to the impact of those discoveries? Maybe people are just no longer interested. It was upsetting to me that the biggest stories around the LHC First beam day last week where centred on the scaremongers warnings of the end of the world. But perhaps that's what sells newspapers.