But is it proportional to the investment of time and people participating in it. If you take the amount of money/people invested into the sciences at a point in time , lets take: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_Conference

And then, put the number of contributors and the rate of progress against one another, my guess is that you would see a massive slowdown of progress, so massive actually, that explenations about the slowdown abound. There is the "all easy apples have been picked" theory, the "only life&death systemic competition forces contributors to produce good science" theory and a ton of others. All basically trying to explain the same phenomena- which could also be explained by: "hackers, hacking hackers, hacking processes, leave no financial substance behind to have people who actually do the scientific leg-work."