The flipside of this is that for gr, I find it amazing how much of the developments are comparatively recent. I could name-drop “have talked/exchanged at least one e-mail with the person who discovered this” for EF-coordinates, gravitational lenses, and rotating (with or without charge) black holes.
Even the “I’ve known someone who met person X” gets you surprisingly far back. (My high school physics teacher was one of the qm pioneers, and I still can’t get over the fact that my predecessor’s father played music with Einstein’s sister. It’s a tapestry.)
I'll never forget arriving at a meeting and having a grad student tell me that one of my "classic" papers was assigned by their major professor. I felt so OLD.
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I have taken to saying, ‘When I was a baby astronomer (ie undergrad/grad school)…’ 😂
Like: ‘When I was a baby astronomer, we were trying to measure the DEceleration parameter of the universe!’