Greatest Scientists of all Time

[epepke]

Good arguments have been made for all candidates, but there are only ten slots. What is needed is some set of criteria to compare scientists. Then arguments could be based on something other than opinion.

What would it involve? Breadth? Solidity? Novelty? Even weighing those differently might give very different answers. I don't know, but here are some random thoughts.

Newton: 3 laws of motion, calculus (but shared with Leibniz), gravitation, optics, modern currency, modern approach to science, hypothesis, and publication. Pretty impressive.

Galileo: 5 laws of motion, scaling calculations, somewhat archaic publication style.

Darwin: Meticulous record-keeping. Hugely important discovery but shared with Wallace and needing the Modern Synthesis.

Turing: As responsible as any other single person for winning WWII. The Turing Test, and the Turing Machine solution to the Entscheidungsproblem, but Church published about lambda calculus first.

Watson, Crick, and Franklin: Hugely important discovery, relatively routine scientific practice.

Hubble: Discovery of other galaxies, observation of the red shift, but got the idea from Slipher, who was right about the mechanism, while Hubble was wrong.

Einstein: Special Relativity wouldn't have been enough, but also General Relativity, the photoelectric effect, and contributions to QM.

Maxwell: Maxwell's equations, and the great unification they imply and foundations for relativity, plus an early additive color theory and contributions to thermodynamics, including Maxwell's Demon.

Feynman: QED, but also an amazing teacher and possibly the only philosophy of science that has much to do with science.

Bolzmann: Another great unification.

Noether: Another great unification, plus retrofitting a foundation to algebra, plus extending Hamilton's work on hypercomplex numbers (some independently reinvented by Dirac)

Faraday: Best known for pioneering work in electromagnetism but also chemistry and diffusion of gases.

 

[John Hewitt]

I listed Josiah Willard Gibbs earlier; he was a physical chemist. I would like to add R. B. Woodward, because he was probably the best organic chemist of all time.

Gibbs was certainly a fine individual scientist but I find it hard to identify any individual with the development of energy and thermodyamic concepts. (If such a person did exist I would grant his or her greatness.) Why put Gibbs over Helmholtz, Joule, Kelvin, Boltzmann or the French lady, whose name I am ashamed to say I cannot remember, who showed the relationships between KE and work?

I didn't know Woodward but he wouldn't make it for me. Sure his lab produced terrific organic chemistry but it is said to have been, more or less, a research factory with him as its managing director. I once worked in such a factory, in biochemistry not chemistry, and have known several such MDs. It is true that their output, or at least that of the people actually doing the work, can become technically very competent but I would not grant that any of them belong in the kind of company discussed here.

 

[Jeff Corey]

Pavlov.

 

[angrysoba]

Pavlov.

Good one!

 

[Chris_Halkides]

Gibbs was certainly a fine individual scientist but I find it hard to identify any individual with the development of energy and thermodyamic concepts. (If such a person did exist I would grant his or her greatness.) Why put Gibbs over Helmholtz, Joule, Kelvin, Boltzmann or the French lady, whose name I am ashamed to say I cannot remember, who showed the relationships between KE and work?

I didn't know Woodward but he wouldn't make it for me. Sure his lab produced terrific organic chemistry but it is said to have been, more or less, a research factory with him as its managing director. I once worked in such a factory, in biochemistry not chemistry, and have known several such MDs. It is true that their output, or at least that of the people actually doing the work, can become technically very competent but I would not grant that any of them belong in the kind of company discussed here.

John Hewitt,

All of the physicists and physical chemists that you mentioned are very impressive scientists, and I don't think that there is a bad choice among them. I thought of Gibbs because of the relationship between the Gibbs' free energy function and the equilibrium constant of a chemical reaction. Someone with a greater understanding of thermodynamics than I have might want to weigh in on what Gibbs' contribution was to the concept of entropy.

Nobel Laureate Derek Barton said of Woodward's work, "The most brilliant analysis ever done on a structural puzzle was surely the solution (1953) of the terramycin problem. It was a problem of great industrial importance, and hence many able chemists had performed an enormous amount of work trying to determine the structure. There seemed to be too much data to resolve the problem, because a significant number of observations, although experimentally correct, were very misleading. Woodward took a large piece of cardboard, wrote on it all the facts and, by thought alone, deduced the correct structure for terramycin. Nobody else could have done that at the time."

That seems to be a recurring theme in Woodward's work, bringing clarity by taking a bunch of disparate observations and finding the thing that underlies them. His collaboration with Hoffman on the rules underlying pericyclic reactions always impressed me. I would not characterize his lab as a factory; he published far fewer papers than lesser chemists, though I recall Hoffman's saying it was significant that they published five communications together in a short span of time in the mid 1960s on this subject. I am a biochemist myself, and I am continually impressed with the ability of organic chemists to make complex molecules out of simple ones.

 

[Tracy Dalziel]

*noting the curious ethno-centricity of these nominations*

With the exception of TriangleMan's mention of Arabic scientists, this list seems to be not only almost exclusively male...but also almost exclusively white.

What of Chinese inventors (who led the world technologically for some time)? Or African (think of the ancient Egyptians)?

There's that whole "standing on the shoulders of giants" thing...well, a great many of the white scientists we're listing here built upon foundations that were built by peoples from other countries/cultures. It was the Muslims who preserved much of the West's scientific heritage while the religious leaders during the Dark Ages were seeking to destroy them (not only preserved them, but built upon them). It was the Chinese who invented technologies that were later appropriated by western countries (generally with little or no acknowledgement).

I'm not trying to be politically correct here -- just to point out what tends to be a dreadful ignorance of real scientific history; if the person who discovered/invented wasn't white (or, in more modern times, born in a Western country), we tend not to ever learn about the person.

Were I to judge solely from this list, I'd have to conclude that almost the entirety of all scientific knowledge and progress has been the exclusive domain of western culture.

Any specific examples ?

 

[Farsight]

Okay, some good nominations, thanks. If I can change tack slightly, I made the assertion that Newton, Einstein and Darwin would be on everyone's top ten list. Is this assertion challenged? If so, why?

Yes. I don't rate Darwin so much. It isn't so much because I have a physics leaning, but because he wasn't the first guy to come up with the idea of evolution. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_evolutionary_thought or http://www.iep.utm.edu/evolutio/ . Here's a snippet from the latter:

"He was, of course, not the first to lay down the origin of species one from another as a formal doctrine. Besides those predecessors of his to whom allusion has already been made, two others may be mentioned here: his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who emphasized organic variability; and still more Lamarck, who denied the immutability of species and forms, and claimed to have demonstrated by observation the gradual development of the animal kingdom. What is new in Charles Darwin is not his theory of descent, but its confirmation by the theory of natural selection and the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence..."

 

[Tracy Dalziel]

Yes. I don't rate Darwin so much. It isn't so much because I have a physics leaning, but because he wasn't the first guy to come up with the idea of evolution. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_evolutionary_thought or http://www.iep.utm.edu/evolutio/ . Here's a snippet from the latter:

"He was, of course, not the first to lay down the origin of species one from another as a formal doctrine. Besides those predecessors of his to whom allusion has already been made, two others may be mentioned here: his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who emphasized organic variability; and still more Lamarck, who denied the immutability of species and forms, and claimed to have demonstrated by observation the gradual development of the animal kingdom. What is new in Charles Darwin is not his theory of descent, but its confirmation by the theory of natural selection and the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence..."

There was also Alfred Russell Wallace who came up with a similar theory at approximately the same time.

 

[randman]

Tesla

Wireless (radio, etc,....), the induction motor, remote control, alternating current and the power grid, plus a whole host of other inventions decades and more ahead of his time, including over the horizon radar and wireless power transmission through manipulation of the vacuum state which he called the ether......Tesla's understanding of electricity and energy is unparalleled.

Guess one might call him more of an inventor than scientist, but he was both. He shaped the modern world we live in, telecommunications, the power grid (which he had obsoleted but we failed to take him up on it), electrical appliances, more efficient designs in energy apparatus, the Tesla coil, designs for submarines, flourescent lighting and a whole host of things.....he even had an early patent for the transistor. Had we listened more to the guy, we'd likely have had computers in the 20s.

I still don't think science has caught up with him. No one can yet duplicate the way he powered boats and things wirelessly without great loss of power from the distance. We still don't really know how he did it.

 

[Olowkow]

Tesla

Wireless (radio, etc,....), the induction motor, remote control, alternating current and the power grid, plus a whole host of other inventions decades and more ahead of his time, including over the horizon radar and wireless power transmission through manipulation of the vacuum state which he called the ether......Tesla's understanding of electricity and energy is unparalleled.

Guess one might call him more of an inventor than scientist, but he was both. He shaped the modern world we live in, telecommunications, the power grid (which he had obsoleted but we failed to take him up on it), electrical appliances, more efficient designs in energy apparatus, the Tesla coil, designs for submarines, flourescent lighting and a whole host of things.....he even had an early patent for the transistor. Had we listened more to the guy, we'd likely have had computers in the 20s.

I still don't think science has caught up with him. No one can yet duplicate the way he powered boats and things wirelessly without great loss of power from the distance. We still don't really know how he did it.

Any source for this? I know he claimed he could, but I have never seen any evidence of this.

 

[Jorghnassen]

Took a while to get a mention of Gauss. And no love for R.A. Fisher?

 

[Olowkow]

Lise Meitner's sad story has always fascinated me. She was among the greats.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lise_Meitner

 

[epepke]

Any source for this? I know he claimed he could, but I have never seen any evidence of this.

You're right. He powered things from a distance, but with a lot of loss of power. He claimed that once enough power was pumped in, it would become self-sustaining. Never actually happened.

Brilliant guy. 3-phase power is great, and his bladeless turbine still shows promise, I think, at least for high-reliability applications. Invented the radio before Marconi but had a wrong idea of how it worked. Really not all that, though, despite the hype.

 

[randman]

Any source for this? I know he claimed he could, but I have never seen any evidence of this.

A few years back the encyclopedia Brittanica cited this. I don't have it here now, but there are other reports as well.

Keep in mind people laughed at him over things like over the horizon radar and all sorts of stuff he was right on, including ac/dc power systems and then the courts mysteriously refused to award him his patent rights for radio, perpetuating the myth Marconi invented radio when he just copied Tesla's designs and Tesla had already demonstrated and built his designs.

Tesla was only awarded the patent rights for radio after his death decades later.

If you ever want a real conspiracy theory to look at, just look at the efforts against Tesla. We are still running off his 1st generation technology despite his having obsoleted it. At the Smithsonian, there are life-sized portraits of Edison in view of the Niagra falls power plant display despite Tesla designing the power plant with Edison claiming it wouldn't work.

The man was a genius so far ahead of his day that after 100 years, we still haven't caught up with him.

 

[randman]

You're right. He powered things from a distance, but with a lot of loss of power. He claimed that once enough power was pumped in, it would become self-sustaining. Never actually happened.

Brilliant guy. 3-phase power is great, and his bladeless turbine still shows promise, I think, at least for high-reliability applications. Invented the radio before Marconi but had a wrong idea of how it worked. Really not all that, though, despite the hype.

Not what I heard. He figured out how to do it without a lot of loss of power. Keep in mind the same critics claimed ac/dc power would result in massive loss of power as well, but he was right. He won on that one because the powers that be could make a lot of money from it, but they were afraid of obsoleting the new goldmine with wireless power.

And I think he was correct on radio and had discovered and utilyzed non-Hertzian waves just as he claimed. He envisioned the vacuum (ether) different than scientists today. Didn't accept relativity which was likely a mistake but knew a lot more about energy than even people do today, imo, which is why conventional electrical engineering cannot really properly explain things like the Casimir effect.

 

[not_so_new]

No mention of Dmitri Mendeleev at all on this thread? I am a little surprised that his name didn't come up (unless I missed it).

 

[Pulvinar]

Tesla

Wireless (radio, etc,....), the induction motor, remote control, alternating current and the power grid, plus a whole host of other inventions decades and more ahead of his time, including over the horizon radar and wireless power transmission through manipulation of the vacuum state which he called the ether......Tesla's understanding of electricity and energy is unparalleled.

Guess one might call him more of an inventor than scientist, but he was both. He shaped the modern world we live in, telecommunications, the power grid (which he had obsoleted but we failed to take him up on it), electrical appliances, more efficient designs in energy apparatus, the Tesla coil, designs for submarines, flourescent lighting and a whole host of things.....he even had an early patent for the transistor. Had we listened more to the guy, we'd likely have had computers in the 20s.

I still don't think science has caught up with him. No one can yet duplicate the way he powered boats and things wirelessly without great loss of power from the distance. We still don't really know how he did it.

Tesla "shaped the modern world"? Granted he was smart (and a great showman), but other inventors had the same ideas around the same time. And he certainly didn't invent the transistor, among others you list. Careful when getting your facts from popularizations...

 

[Harpo]

Paul Dirac.

Kurt Godel.

Francis Crick/James Watson.

Murray Gell-Mann.

William Herschel.

No love for these chaps?

 

[Dinwar]

Tesla "shaped the modern world"? Granted he was smart (and a great showman), but other inventors had the same ideas around the same time. And he certainly didn't invent the transistor, among others you list. Careful when getting your facts from popularizations...

randman peddling false information? I'm shocked! Shocked, I say!

Not sure Tesla counts as a great scientist, either way. He may have been a great INVENTOR, but how many times has his research been cited? How many theories rely on his work? Again, Smith's map invented geology. Newton, Galleleo, Kepler, and those guys invented PHYSICS a we know it today. Mary Currie helped invent nuclear physics, a field that's had profound implications in everything from geology to medicine. Frankly, as good as he was Tesla has never done anything of that magnitude. Even if everything randman said about Tesla is true, he's still not a great scientist, and shouldn't be included on this list.

 

[Dinwar]

Francis Crick/James Watson.

These two really didn't prove DNA was the genetic molecule--they just demonstrated the structure of it. And Crick went loopy, so he's burned a lot of the good will he earned.

Besides, if we're going to credit someone with genetics, it should be Mendel.