Sorry if this is a bit vague, but I'm reading my textbooks for university and it the dates of discoveries and experiments always surprise me.
For example, apparently by the early 1900's biochemists have isolated hundreds of different chemicals from living cells. I thought this was pretty insane, cause I didn't think they'd have the knowledge or technology to do so by that time.
There seems to be a disconnect, at least in my mind, between 'we can do basic experiments and just learning about the universe' to 'high-tech experiments and synthesis of unnatural stuff'. Like there's a massive jump, and not a lot is talked about in between. Is there like a point in time when we can consider that we've just started to enter into the world where scientists started to really gain steam and into the modern(something like what's taught in universities today) level?
It seems to me that around the 1930-1950s was a big time for science. The creation of the atomic bomb, the photo-electric effect, DNA experiments, etc. But was it really there where things really got advanced? I remember my OChem prof saying that OChem has been taught the same for like a 100 years(although this may have been just a flippant statement by him). It seems like some areas had advanced pretty far while others took longer before making massive strides.
Thanks.
"Modern" is a very tricky term to use, but generally speaking, the scientific "profession" as we recognize it today — as a regular career path with supporting institutions — is formalized over the course of the 19th century. This is the period in which science goes from "a bunch of eccentric rich guys tinkering around and writing about it" (much of 18th- and pre-18th century science is of this character, with the exceptions being extremely exceptional), to "the sort of thing that is routinely done in research universities and industrial firms."
Like all periodizations, this is always going to be a moving target — you can find some aspects of "modern science" in earlier periods, depending on how much you want to stretch the definitions. There isn't one moment when people got up and said, "hey, let's be modern scientists!" But there are trends, and things start to look pretty familiar by the mid-19th century.
Even then, as you've noted, things get really intense by the 20th century, which provides influxes of interest and capital on a scale that were unprecedented. But the system that interest and capital was being injected into was essentially the one of the 19th century.
Separately, I would just note that you are looking at the ideas side of science. That's often what we spend attention on, and is why someone like Galileo ranks so highly as an early "scientist." But the historian is more likely to look at the institutions of science — the systems that produce the knowledge and make it do "work." Galileo, in this sense, looks very unlike a modern scientist, working as a sort of "house scientist" for a major political family (the Medicis).