Einstein Overrated

Feynman, Schwinger and Witten have been the greatest physicists since Einstein's era.

There's been many charlatans, but when you essentially author a brand new field of science (Feynman & Schwinger), then, well, you're in good company.

Einstein would have done enough for the physics community on his work on general relativity, but he just had a fine intuition for matters in life. He didn't run the experiments, hell he didn't derive the equations for many of his known achievements like for special relativity, or photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, he was just able to "connect the dots" and apply the right sort of interpretation.

For example
General Relativity, is from Special relativity; and General Relativity is a pure brute theoretical physics. I give him full credit for that.

Special relativity. The equations were actually from Lorenz

Photoelectric effect. Hertz ran the experiment. Einstein was the one to explain it, based off of Plank's quantization.

Brownian motion. JJ Thompson found the (differential) equation earlier. Nernst calculated a constant relevant for the equation. The whole thing was best explained through Einstein. Actually the whole thing wasn't more fully explained in detail by Wiener.

Bose-Einstein everything. Bose was the one to discover the relevation. Einstein realized what importance the discovery was and applied it to the statistics, condensate, correlations

Mass Energy Equivalence. Actually maxwell found out that mass and momentum had been related years before. It was Einstein was figure out the first order approximation  to apply mass to energy.

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A truely underrated polymath of our day was Neumann
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Considering his own work was a matter of half intuition (fully appreciating Plank's work and solve an unsolved problem), without formal proof, without the need to experiment, and the overall relevance of the photoelectric effect to QM; his contribution is not as fundamental or as necessarily as you'd wish.

Plank realized electromagnetic radiation was quantized. Specifically he was trying to figure reconcile the color differences when an object was heated. It's been since Newton's time that color was inherently related to light.

The light-matter interaction wasn't understood at that time, but Einstein was the one just fresh off of understanding the mass-energy equivalence from his work on special relativity, so when he applied his background, the whole thing worked, and he could speak with authority on the results. That whole thing would go on to spawn QM, and Einstein was partly responsible for it, but it was a minor plug and chug -- he wasn't interested in it enough to lead the experimentation of his results -- his focus was on relativity...

read on how close maxwell got it...
http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath601/kmath601.htm