Janot's reference to the Michelson-Morley experiment setting the stage for Einstein, got me thinking about standing on the shoulders of giants.
Zero's (very worthy) suggestion of Darwin leads back to Linnaeus, without whom Darwin would not have had binomial nomenclature to work with.
Linnaeus had some very 18th century ideas about race that make us cringe nowadays, but he is responsible for the bedrock structure that the theory of evolution is built on.
There must be other "lesser-known giants" without whom the big names that we all know would not have had a starting point?
I'm going to go with something a bit different and say the Casimir effect. Every new discovery we made seemed to show that pretty much everything is empty space - the universe in general is mostly empty space, matter is mostly empty space, atoms are actually mostly empty space, and so on. Then Casimir and Polder came along and showed that there's actually no such thing as empty space.
I disagree. I think Darwin gets a lot more credit than he actually deserves. Certainly he did a lot of good work, but there was nothing particularly revolutionary about it at all. Many people were thinking along similar lines. Lamarck had published his theory before Darwin was even born. It's important to remember that while Lamarck was wrong, his theory had exactly the same consequences as Darwin's - evolution with no need for any higher power. And while few other people had tried putting together a coherent theory, transmutation of species was a well established idea - even Darwin's own grandfather had advocated it. Finally, at least one person, Wallace, already had pretty much the same theory, including having published parts of it.Originally Posted by Wintings
I'm not trying to put Darwin down, after all he was well established as a scientific authority long before be published anything on evolution anyway, but the popular view of him being some revolutionary maverick just isn't true. He was a man of his time thinking about similar issues, doing similar work and coming up with similar ideas as many other people at the time. He was first to publish a relatively complete theory that could actually work, but none of the ideas in it were really revolutionary, certainly not the idea that evolution could take place with no gods necessary.
Plate tectonics for vindicating every schoolkid who noticed that South America and Africa fit together.
I'm going to go for Robert Hooke and and his widgets! I have an appreciation of widgets as hubby designs them for the pharma industry.
You need widgets to do science.
You also need widgets to get a frothy head from canned beer!
I call everything a widget because I have a lousy memory for names ('specially when they all sound like the names of robots in a cheap sci fi film!), or I rename things like 'sloshing machine' or 'pill squasher watnot'.
Robert Hooke came up with ideas and made things that opened up new horizons and that rocks! Not to mention that he could draw a bit and was sort of cool at science.
I'm amazed that no-one's mentioned the internet yet.
I mean, it's done everything from revolutionising the way that people watch porn, to breathing new life into the adult film industry. Tim Berners-Lee deserves a knighthood for his services to the field of pornography.
No, there is another way...
I think the requirement is for the head to be on the beer, not on the face of the person who was in front of the can when you shook it and then opened it ...
Fire.
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