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Ten Most Important Scientific Discoveries · Jul 25, 09:32 AM

I’be been pulling together materials for a course I’m going to teach in the fall, Imagining Science, & last night began drawing up a list of the ten most significant scientific (not technological) discoveries I could think of. I’ve cheated a little by combining related discoveries, but you get the idea. I’ve got eight items so far. What else should be on the list?

  1. Heliocentric solar system / Moons of Jupiter
  2. Eliptical orbits of planets
  3. Newtonian gravity
  4. Other galaxies / red shift / Big Bang / Expanding universe
  5. General Relativity
  6. Evolution / natural selection
  7. Structure of DNA
  8. Turing machines

* * *

  1. Would the scientific method itself be considered a worthy discovery to include? It is a well-devised and constantly evolving system for understanding the world, and it is what separates true science from the approaching darkness.
    — Paul Lamble    07/25/2005 10:47 AM    #
  2. The scientific method is a fiction that came from the philosophy of science in the mid-19th Century. Whewell was interested in producing regularity in the way scientific discovery is achieved. I don’t know if these make your list, but the germ theory of disease and the energy released by splitting atoms might lead you to a top twenty.
    — chris robinson    07/25/2005 11:02 AM    #
  3. You need something from quantum physics; particle/wave duality, perhaps. Or just the internal structure of the atom.

    I’m a fan of James Clerk Maxwell for unifying electricity, magnetism and light into different aspects of the same phenomenon, too.

    Calculus and statistics are immensely important, though depending on your philosophical standpoint mathematical techniques might be technology rather than science.

    Newtonian gravity is only half the story without the Laws of Motion.

    The pushing back of the age of the earth from a few thousand years to billions of years, and all the associated geology.

    Tectonic plates.
    — Harry R    07/25/2005 11:07 AM    #
  4. These are good. Just what I hoped for in posting my list.
    — jd    07/25/2005 12:41 PM    #
  5. Numbers.
    — Sam    07/25/2005 06:02 PM    #
  6. Jeez wileez, Joe, the circulation of the blood.

    Mart
    — Mart Stewart    07/25/2005 07:46 PM    #
  7. I would lump elliptical orbits and perhaps even Newtonian gravity in with the heliocentric theory. Perhaps you could call it “the classical dynamics of planetary motion.” Point 4 could be summed up with “Hubble’s Law,” definitely deserving of a top-10 spot. I’d argue the Turing machine is not. It had very little influence outside an obscure and not particularly useful theorem.

    Harry R’s on the right track, the list should definitely include Maxwell’s Electromagnetism and the quantum mechanical model of the atom. All modern science, including relativity and quantum mechanics, hinges on Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism.

    Radioactivity should be considered. It was a combination of electromagnetism and radioactivity that lead to modern atomic and particle physics (it is also essential in dating the Earth). I would also consider the periodic table and vaccination.
    — efp    07/25/2005 08:19 PM    #
  8. Keep them coming, people, I am imagining a really intersting assignment for my students early in the semester: Science AS Imagination.
    — jd    07/25/2005 09:26 PM    #
  9. Wings, man, wings!

    In no other idea has the imagination so driven study for so long, with such a comparitively great impact on man’s recent history and social life.
    — phaTTboi    07/26/2005 01:35 AM    #
  10. Aren’t wings a technological discovery?
    — jd    07/26/2005 10:22 AM    #
  11. I’ve been thinking about this a little more in terms of where you’re probably coming from: identifying the discoveries which have most impacted our imaginative landscape. From this perspective, I’d say the heliocentric model (as proposed by Galileo/Kepler based on observational data) is distinct from Newtonian gravity (making the philosophic leap that heavenly bodies obeyed the same laws of motion as everything else).

    The biggest imaginative leap in quantum mechanics would be Bohm’s interpretation of the wavefunction, but all the (still unsolved) mysteries of quantum mechanics are best summed up in the “Copenhagen Interpretation,” which must be considered the greatest landmark in the field. As Feynman said, QM teaches us that the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than we can imagine.

    I’m thinking Freud’s notion of the unconscious drastically changed the way we imagine ourselves, but I’m not sure one could call it a scientific discovery. Something of the mind/brain relationship deserves to be on there, but I can’t think of a representative event.

    Regarding science “as” imagination: Einstein was especially explicit about the paramount role of imagination, or the “free play of ideas,” in science. He had a somewhat Kantian, or anti-inductive epistemology. His writing on the subject would make a fine source. I also recommend the first chapter of Dawkins’ “Unweaving the Rainbow”.
    — efp    07/26/2005 03:24 PM    #
  12. “Aren’t wings a technological discovery?”

    In a lot of ways, wings, and the problems of figuring out how to make something so obviously practical and common in nature actually work for man, created much of the Western idea of science. For the fact is, even today, we don’t know, exactly, how wings work in all phases of flight. Yep, that’s right. We don’t know how perfectly operable wings work in all phases of flight. For example, a straightforward pure application of Bernoulli’s principle will get you off the ground, and about 10 to 60 feet in the air, depending on your aircraft’s dimensions and power, and then, woops! You can’t stay airborne on Bernoulli’s ideas. Earth boundary layer transition is a bitch, and you get through it generally on extra power, and greater than apparently required angle of attack.

    So no modern plane with wings trusts entirely to Bernoulli in critical flight phases. And a bumblebee never does…:-)

    All kiddin’ aside, wings are one of the earliest mythic, magical, imaginative elements in all cultures, and a constant source of investigation, experiment, and method study even today. Wings are both pure and applied science, Joe, and still mysterious beauty for the eye and mind. Wings are, in the opinion of any flier, the most human thing we make, because they cost us so dearly, and free us so greatly, and carry a legacy of tragedy and glory. And wings still push techological and scientific development in many seemingly unrelated fields. We’re still working to build supercomputers sophisticated enough to model supercritical wing design in only a few flight phases. Metallurgists and materials scientists still struggle to understand what happens in simple wing structures in ordinary flight, and improve their insight and knowledge by tackling many still intractable problems.

    Just because something seems obvious and simple, doesn’t mean it is…
    — phaTTboi    07/26/2005 08:33 PM    #
  13. Heisenberg uncertainty principle—that in the world of quantom physics, nothing truly exists in fixed state until you measure it, or also stated that by measuring something you force other attributes to change (or I guess stated a third way, objects appear differently when observed).
    — Daniel Barkowitz    07/26/2005 08:50 PM    #