alt Hacker NewsEinstein's 1905 Annus Mirabilis papers seem like they easiest of the bunch to just read through. I just pulled up 'Über die von der molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme geforderte Bewegung von in ruhenden Flüssigkeiten suspendierten Teilchen', the one about Brownian motion, and read the whole thing. It's only 12 pages and fairly accessible; more prose than equations.
(Of course, if you don't read German, you should get yourself a translation.)
See https://myweb.rz.uni-augsburg.de/~eckern/adp/history/einstei...
I don't think I'm smart enough to casually read and understand original works on General relativity, but the Annus Mirabilis work seems much simpler. The famous E=MC2 paper is only three pages.
See https://myweb.rz.uni-augsburg.de/~eckern/adp/history/einstei...
About Gödel: if you are interested in the theorems, and not necessarily their original presentation, you can get plenty of rigorous modern treatments. It's very common for mathematicians to work out simpler proofs and more appealing presentations of famous results over time.
See https://dn721807.ca.archive.org/0/items/uber-formal-unentsch... if you want to give one of Gödel's work a go. It's only 26 pages. Footnote 48a is especially interesting. Overall the prose is crisp, but the notation is rather archaic to modern eyes.
I agree with your general sentiment, and your heuristic in general.
My point is that each of the material above (and i forgot to add the original Quantum Mechanics papers) were major watershed moments in science/mathematics and hence are not easy to read/understand. You need a good background in the subject matter(and mathematics) and/or somebody guiding you through them.
So what i do is try and find books which are written for the "educated common reader" by an expert who guides you through the original paper/book. It is still difficult to understand if you do not have the necessary background but at least you have a good starting point.
Some books in my collection;
1) Newton's Principia for the Common Reader by S.Chandrasekhar
2) Maxwell on the Electromagnetic Field: A Guided Study (Masterworks of Discovery) by Thomas Simpson
3) Einstein's Miraculous Year by John Stachel.
4) The Annotated Turing by Charles Petzold.
What we need is for a group of professors to get together and start writing a series on explaining the original papers to the "educated common reader" i.e. not too trivial nor too overwhelming. I think there is a huge market for this since it humanizes how science is done in real life which is fundamental for motivation.