On whose shoulders stood the likes of Aristotle, Emerson, Einstein?

Good question. I don’t know about Einstein or Emerson, but Aristotle was a student of Plato, who was a student of Socrates.

Don’t these (and others) really stand out because they questioned the existing paradigm rather than building on it? It may be that nothing is new, but there may be new ways of looking at old things.

I imagine the women in at least some of these people’s lives.

Einstein’s wife helped him work through his theories and even came up with some important ideas, for example. John Stuart Mill, one of my favorite philosophers, also wrote a lot of stuff in consultation with his wife, iirc.

It’s only very recently in history that women in most places have even gotten the right to own property. So I wouldn’t be surprised if many important thinkers failed to credit the women who helped them come up with their ideas. (Of course, I’m sure lots of important thinkers were misogynists who didn’t care what women thought.)

Einstein stood on the shoulders of Maxwell and Lorentz.

In the western tradition it all pretty much goes back to Socrates.

Aristotle built on the works of early Greek thinkers, particularly Socrates and Heraclitus, who was one of the first thinkers we know of who argued for an ordered universe governed by definable laws, and argued in a rational manner giving reasons for his assertions. They in turn built on earlier works of which we have no knowledge, including influences from the Ionions, Lydians and Persians.

Einstein largely built on the works of Maxwell and Lorentz, as @Rarebear says, as well as Minkowski and Galileo. Although Minkowski’s major work came after Einstein’s Special Relativity, it no doubt contributed to the formulation of the General Theory.

I know nothing about Emerson, but there are no doubt unknown geniuses who put the seeds of creativity in his mind.

In Einstein’s case, in regards to general relativity, there was Tullio Levi-Civita.

(“I admire the elegance of your method of computation; it must be nice to ride through these fields upon the horse of true mathematics while the like of us have to make our way laboriously on foot” – Einstein to Levi-Civita)

Poincare was also important in the development of relativity.

Pythagorus, 572 BCE, and start with some Chaldean or Sumerian astrologer/asrtonomers. Keep in mind that at that time, there was no real difference between astrology and astronomy. Anyway, the Chaldean and Sumerian astrologers would have had some way to measure the angles of stars and moon as they rose, travelled across, and set in the skies. We don’t know what it is, but the existence of some standard seems pretty certain.

Chemistry as a science developed from alchemy, the search for the means to transform lead into gold, which I think we can actually do now, but its cost prohibitive, ie, it costs more to make the gold than it’s worth

From early mathematics of Euclid and Pythagoras, we derive Euclidean Geometry and the Pythagoran Theorem, both of which are necessary for us to build with. The Egyptians and everybody else seem to have gotten along without those theorems, but I am sure they had some consistent means of measurement; the buildings they left are just to darn perfect.

The truth is that every curious person in between each of those individuals contributed to their discoveries.

@casacooper Actually the Egyptians were aware of Pythagoras’ Theorem (not actually discovered by Pythagoras) to some extent, in that they knew a 3–4-5 triangle would always subtend a right angle.