Hard to say. The Feynman Lectures aren’t universally loved. Physics courses that used hem as a textbook lost a lot of students although I read them myself on the way to a physics PhD and enjoyed them.<p>In physics I think there is no opportunity in research to do what Feynman did. Sure Ed Witten is a smart guy and did some really cool math but he hasn’t done a single thing connected to experiments and quite possibly his work will never be confirmed.<p>I know a prof who is famous for his machine learning work who has written some undergrad textbooks that I was impressed with but someone who worked with him as a TA (and now teaches CS at a small Christian college) was not impressed with that prof’s commitment to education.<p>I’m sure people who have done important research (say in biomedicine) have written great textbooks and done research but I don’t know them my name.
Under today's conditions, there are no incentives for such a person to emerge or to be rewarded. You might as well ask what happened to Bell Labs.