They were pioneers, but you are comparing modern research structures, labs of Nuclear Science and matter knowledge to those of one century ago. Incomparable.
I suggest you read some books about the history of science and technology. Do you have any idea how much nuclear science was discovered before 1950, by scientists of the Class of 1920 (or thereabouts)? Do you know who ran Los Alamos during WWII? Do some arithmetic and figure out when those people were born.
I'll leave it at that.
Do you think that in 21 century the study of "condensed matter" is a field of which cold fusionist are the only edge or researchers interested?
I am not sure what that sentence means. Are you asking if there are other cutting edge physics and technology? I don't know much about modern science, but I can see that apart from biology not much is happening. String theory hardly compares to Einstein or Dirac. In technology, a lot is happening in computers and robotics, but nearly all of it is based on old breakthroughs. It is mainly based on von Neumann architecture circa 1945, C. Shannon's information theory 1948, integrated circuits of 1958, and neural networks circa 1943. We finally got neural networks to work, which is good, but I learned about them at Cornell in 1972. These things were old hat by that time. There have not been many fundamental improvements to computing that I did not hear about in the 1970s. Of course a million details were filled in, and progress was made, but it has been mainly incremental progress. Many of today's cutting edge ideas were described by Grace Hopper in detail in the 1950s. Some of her ideas have still not been implemented, and they darn well should be.
Fiber optics came out of nowhere, unanticipated as far as I know, in 1964. The first person to transmit voice by light instead of electricity was A. G. Bell in 1880, so the idea has been around.
Of course, planetary science is doing fabulously. It could not exist before 1950. The essential breakthroughs were made by K. Tsiolkovsky in 1903 and Goddard in 1926. That was a long time ago, and it was smack in the golden of science and technology, as I mentioned. There have been no fundamental improvements in access to space. I hope a space elevator is possible. The first serious work on space elevators was done by K. Tsiolkovsky in 1895. The same guy who invented rockets.