I'm wondering because I know that these were incredibly important breakthroughs that changed the human race's understanding of the universe and fundamental ways. But I'm wondering if there was an equivalent in places like China, India, Japan, or Southeast Asia. Is there a reason that those discoveries happened in Europe and not in any of the places I just listed? Is it just because men like Einstein or Newton were unique figures at that time or place? Or, was there a deeper more cultural or societal reason then these individuals and their discoveries never sprung up outside of Europe?
Science is a leisure activity. What I mean by that is, even today, it does not pay well. Scientists, for the longest time, came from aristocrat families because they had the resources and the free time to pursue science (a frustrating and mostly unrewarding discipline in itself).
Most non- European countries were colonized in the last 300 years. People, and the colonies, simply didn't have the resources for higher education (where they were often discriminated against or downright prohibited from engaging in post- secondary education), had a hard time maintaining their livelihood and their families when their society was being openly exploited, and often chose to go into politics or independence movements if they had the time and resources because that was the priority for them.
That said, people you mentioned are all physicists. Many scientists (speaking from an Indian perspective, Dr. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Dr. Homi J. Bhabha, etc.) engaged in pursuit of science, but they were a minority for the reasons I outlined above.
If you go back far enough before colonization, vast strides in medicine, mathematics, physics, astronomy, etc. were made in Asia (again speaking from an Indian perspective, Charaka, Suchruta, the development of the 0 and the decimal system, etc.).
So to sum it up, engaging in cutting- edge science require huge amount of resources and time. Even a simple, small, academic lab of 5 people today used up hundreds of thousands- millions of dollars every year. Colonized countries simply did not have the resources in the last three hundred years, and the intellectual elite often chose other ways to empower their repressed societies and contribute to an independence movement of some sort.
PM if you wanna talk more man. Cheers.