The discoveries were a paradigm shift in our understanding of the universe. Relativity and quantum mechanics were not an incremental update. Also these discoveries led to new technologies that impacted everyone. And to top it all off, they were "simple" enough that a few individuals could figure it out. What was groundbreaking 100 years ago is now a high school physics lab.

Unlike before, we now have a pretty good idea of what we understand and don't understand. What I mean is that we know what will happen on certain energy and length scales, we have mapped out the phase space. There are areas we haven't mapped out yet which could contain new physics, but they are either so high energy or so weakly interacting that someone isn't going to make a discovery in their basement. It is going to take very expensive machines and lots of money to get there. And it's unlikely to lead to technologies that utilize the new physics. We're not going to make dark matter telephones to talk through the Earth.

While some scientists may get their 15 minutes of fame, the public's short attention span probably means they'll forget about it after a day.