EGarrett comments on Productivity as a function of ability in theoretical fields - Less Wrong
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I'm not sure I would agree with the premise that Aristotle is less important than Einstein. Einstein greatly accelerated several fields of physics. Aristotle has long since been superceded in essentially every field, but his ideas still inform (indirectly) more modern work in logic, ethics, metaphysics, and so on. He was certainly productive, no doubt about that.
Also, there's no finite set of important solvable problems. Today, the available solvable problems may or may not be in physics, but there are plenty on other fields.
Aristotle in all likelihood was relating ideas that were collected already in his personal library or the Library of Alexandria. The way he wrote about the various topics he did implied that they were coming from other sources.