I've been reading Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and he talks about the public-relations problem inherent in all scientific paradigm shifts. "Big Ideas", he argues, have historically been delivered in big books written for a reasonably generalized-but-intelligent audience -- such as Benjamin Franklin's Experiments and Observations on Electricity, or Darwin's Origin of Species. Only later do the intellectual paradigms ossify and you get dusty academics delivering increasingly narrowly-focussed papers that nobody but initiates can read.

I dunno -- seems like Einstein's theory of relativity is a massive example that contradicts this theory. It started out as a pretty esoteric and rarely-read theory, studied only by those close to the field, but decades later became something almost every high school student knows (or pretends to know, anyway.)