One of the interesting things in http://businessinnovation.berkeley.edu/WilliamsonSeminar/jon... is the graphs and comments on quantum mechanics - everyone involved got degrees and did their Nobel-worth work astonishingly young. The 'bag of jewels' metaphor really is apt, because it seems you had only to be young and flexible-minded to do groundbreaking work. There will probably never again be a period of such riches in physics (he said in 2013, more than a century after Planck's quanta).
In the late 19th century, many physicists thought they had physics pretty well sewn up, with just a few loose ends. Of course it turns out that those loose ends led to quantum mechanics and relativity, completely revolutionizing the field.
Today it seems that physics has most things pretty well figured out, but there are the loose ends of dark matter and dark energy. We don't know exactly what they are, but they seem to make up almost 95% of the content of the universe! So there might still be a chance for another wholesale revolution or two in physics.
http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2013/06/25/it-takes-guts-to-do... also comes to mind as Dirac and quantum mechanics related.