"None of the truly great achievements of science were done through atomized conjectures and refutations." - that is kind of tautology - only the big steps are called truly great - the small steps are just small steps.
I don't think it's a tautology. The question is whether those "small steps" ever add up to anything "great." When many people think of scientific progress or "the scientific method," they imagine innumerable scientists working across the world, each making incremental contributions to a shared body of knowledge, one peer reviewed article at a time. There's something that seems even virtuous about this picture, which I imagine is part of its appeal.
The question is what do you call "great" and my hunch is that "great" means "impressive" or "surprising" - and when you see lots of small steps they don't seem impressive and they don't surprise.
