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The Greatest Scientists of All Time... 

Threads - The Greatest Scientists of All Time, The Greatest Scientists
On  11/2/2004, Paul Williams posted:

On another science list we are compiling a list - so far only three women...(I supplied 2 of them)
It has grown somewhat from the initial stipulation of a Top Ten...

Cheers
Paul

Greatest Scientists of All Time?

Aristotle
Archimedes
Hypatia of Alexandria
Galileo Galilei
Isaac Newton
Robert Hooke
Gottfried Leibniz
Antoni van Leeuwenhoek
Antoine Lavoisier
Johannes Kepler
Karl Friedrich Gauss
Louis Pasteur
Charles Darwin
James Maxwell
Albert Einstein
Lise Meitner
Max Planck
Werner Heisenberg
Erwin Schrodinger
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Marie Curie
Niels Bohr
Dmitri Mendeleev
Kurt Goedel
Alan Turing


Sandie Stockwell added:

Linus Pauling

Rosalind Franklin


Margaret Ruwoldt responded:

Laura Bassi (1711-1778)

http://www.hypatiamaze.org/laura/bassi.html


From Adrian Carr:

Two more worthy of a place on the existing list.
Bill Smith  1769 -1839

I jest not.   -  Read "The Map That Changed The World" - Simon Winchester.

Nikola Tesla   1856 -1943

 A true genius   A fascinating life story well worth a read.

Paul Williams commented:

Rosalind Franklin was definitely shafted by Watson and Crick but one couldn't put her amongst the "Greats".  

Linus Pauling is definitely up there and arguably would have himself eventually described the structure of DNA. Franklin's x-ray diffraction image would have given it to him.  Pauling went a little silly in his later years - but I suppose we all do...


Tim Daly wrote:

Omitted from ranks of wizards noted so far, is an Italian, one Leonardo Da Vinci (1452 - 1519). While he is possibly more renown as an artist, it seems he interested himself in some useful 'science' matters. How say all of you ??

When selecting the 'Greatest Scientists, would it not be useful to define the term 'Scientists' ? and how should the great Philosophers, Founders of major religious sects and/or Military and Political strategists be classified ? as scientists or something else ?

The Macquarie Dictionary's definition of Science and Scientists is fairly broad.

Ivan Sayer posted:

I'm biassed of course, but if you include Einstein there is a case for including the man whose mathematics made the whole Einstein enterprise possible - Bernard Riemann  (He was poor, constantly ill and died at forty or so.)  Then there's Eudoxus, who invented the fraction, Descartes who invented analytical geometry, and surely there's a case for Lobachewski ?

Keith Parker noted:

"Rosalind Franklin was definitely shafted by Watson and Crick"......I can't agree with this (suspect feminist?) interpretation. Rosalind was a very adept crystallographer and produced the first good shots of DNA,but when W&C published she had already left King's (and DNA) to work on TMV. Had she lived she would probably have recieved a third of the Nobel prize...not the first to be so lauded for a relatively minor piece of work.

Anthony Morton responded:

I think it was a classic piece of complementary research: Watson and Crick had a structure in their heads but no data; Franklin had the data but didn't fully comprehend its implications for the structure.  Credit goes to W&C for their unique insight, but without Franklin's particular skills they had no hard findings to report.

It's a matter of opinion as to whether elucidating the structure of DNA was a 'minor' piece of work.  Franklin probably deserved it along with W&C as much or as little as Penzias and Wilson did for discovering the cosmic background radiation.  The latter after all were mere 'adept radio technicians' who were puzzled about noise in their microwave antenna.

Personally I'd argue that Rosalind Franklin was more worthy of accolades than Henry Kissinger, or almost every winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics.

David Dixon commented:

Its nice to see a Geologist suggested. The original list looked like the Greatest Physicists and Chemists, with a token Biologist or two. Why not Hutton, Lyell or Agassiz as well,  to name but a few.

Paul Williams, replying to Ivan Sayer:

Rene Descartes should be there and Riemann of course.
The list was becoming saturated with physicists and mathematicians.  Perhaps this is right anyway, for along with chemists they collectively have formed the backbone of our progressively better understanding of the world - and indeed, the Universe.

Wearing my ignorance on my sleeve - Eudoxus I don't know much about except that he was wrong about the movements of the planets (nothing wrong with that of course) - Lobachewski I've sadly never even heard of....?

 to Tim Daly:

Leonardo was perhaps the last of the great polymaths.
A genius in many, many spheres.
I'm not sure if he produced scientific work which resulted in a paradigm shift in our understanding of the world though (see below).


> When selecting the 'Greatest Scientists, would it not be useful to define
> the term 'Scientists' ? and how should the great Philosophers, Founders of
> major religious sects and/or Military and Political strategists be classified ? as scientists or something else ?
>
> The Macquarie Dictionary's definition of Science and Scientists is fairly broad.

My interpretation is: Those who thought outside the boundaries (this can of course denote genius or madness) - BUT also produced theoretical work which changed our understanding of reality in significant ways.
In other words - those who produced conceptual breakthoughs which changed our world.
How does that sound?

and to Adrian Carr:

> Two more worthy of a place on the existing list.
> Bill Smith  1769 -1839
>
> I jest not.   -  Read "The Map That Changed The World" - Simon Winchester.

Great suggestion - a paradigm shift in our understanding of the world came from his work:

"In 1831, the Geological Society of London instituted the Wollaston Medal, its highest honor, awarded each year for outstanding achievement in geology. Smith received the first Wollaston Medal that same year. The geologist Adam Sedgwick, then President of the Society, presented the award to Smith with these words: "

"If, in the pride of our present strength, we were disposed to forget our origin, our very speech betrays us: for we use the language which he taught us in the infancy of our science. If we, by our united efforts, are chiselling the ornaments and slowly raising up the pinnacles of one of the temples of nature, it was he that gave the plan, and laid the foundations, and erected a portion of the solid walls, by the unassisted labour of his hands."
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/smith.html


> Nikola Tesla   1856 -1943
>
>  A true genius   A fascinating life story well worth a read.

Yes  - Tesla has my vote as well - (for whatever that's worth) :-)
(We may well end up with a list of a hundred - and even then we would be short-changing many great scientists)
Ivan Sayer, replying to Paul:

Eudoxus was the first (recorded) person to have a complete theory of ratio.  It forms the third (from memory) book of Euclid's Elements. When modern university pedagogues had invented a viable theory of real numbers out of the remains of Cauchy, Bolzano, Weierstrass and Cantor they realized that all they had arrived at was a version of Euclid three in modern language.  That's longevity!

Lobachewski is remarkable because he single-handedly invented hyperbolic non-euclidean Geometry.  He gets a good chapter in 'Men of Mathematics' by Eric Temple Bell.  (The Dong with the Luminous Prose).  Bell possibly exaggerated his virtues, personal and intellectual, but they were very great.  I still occasionally read him for that good old feeling that I'm looking at one of the places where it really happened.

Jim Edwards posted:

Tom Lehrer's tribute to Lobachevsky:

Who made me the genius I am today,
The mathematician that others all quote?
Who's the professor that made me that way,
The greatest that ever got chalk on his coat?

One man deserves the credit,
One man deserves the blame,
and Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name.  Oy!
Nicolai Ivanovich Lobache...

I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky.
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics: Plagiarize!

Plagiarize,
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize...
Only be sure always to call it please, "research".

And ever since I meet this man my life is not the same,
And Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name.  Oy!
Nicolai Ivanovich Lobache...

I am never forget the day I am given first original paper to write.  It
was on Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrization
of Infinitely Differentiable Riemannian Manifold.
Bozhe moi!
This I know from nothing.**
But I think of great Lobachevsky and I get idea - haha!

I have a friend in Minsk,
Who has a friend in Pinsk,
Whose friend in Omsk
Has friend in Tomsk
With friend in Akmolinsk.
His friend in Alexandrovsk
Has friend in Petropavlovsk,
Whose friend somehow
Is solving now
The problem in Dnepropetrovsk.

And when his work is done -
Haha! - begins the fun.
>From Dnepropetrovsk
To Petropavlovsk,
By way of Iliysk,
And Novorossiysk,
To Alexandrovsk to Akmolinsk
To Tomsk to Omsk
To Pinsk to Minsk
To me the news will run,
Yes, to me the news will run!

And then I write
By morning, night,
And afternoon,
And pretty soon
My name in Dnepropetrovsk is cursed,
When he finds out I published first!

And who made me a big success
And brought me wealth and fame?
Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name.  Oy!
Nicolai Ivanovich Lobache...


I am never forget the day my first book is published.
Every chapter I stole from somewhere else.
Index I copy from old Vladivostok telephone directory.
This book, this book was sensational!***
Pravda - ah, Pravda - Pravda said:
"Jeel beel kara ogoday blyum blocha jeli," ("It stinks").
But Izvestia!  Izvestia said:
"Jai, do gudoo sun sai pere shcum," ("It stinks").
Metro-Goldwyn-Moskva bought the movie rights for six million rubles,
Changing title to 'The Eternal Triangle',
With Brigitte Bardot playing part of hypotenuse.****


And who deserves the credit?
And who deserves the blame?
Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name.
Oy!


Toby Fiander commented:

Keith Parker wrote:
>  I can't agree with this (suspect feminist?) interpretation. Rosalind was a
>  very adept crystallographer and produced the first good shots of DNA,
>  but when W&C published she had already left King's (and DNA) to
>  work on TMV. Had she lived she would probably have recieved a third
>  of the Nobel prize...not the first to be so lauded for a relatively minor
>  piece of work.

I notice Tony has already given a rather more balanced interpretation of what occurred with Watson and Crick.  I have previously reviewed on this list the biography of Rosalind Franklin by Brenda Maddox.

The major difficulty with Watson and Crick's behaviour is that they used information attributable to Rosalind Franklin without her knowledge, let alone approval.  Indeed, it is possible that she never knew that reason the supporting paper she wrote for Nature agreed with W&C's finding precisely because it was based on much the same information.

Today, this sort of behaviour would be regarded as borderline and possibly theft of intellectual property.  The very least you could say is that Watson and Crick behaved disgracefully... that Franklin was treated badly largely because she was an outsider (of which being a woman was only part) and that Wilkins' role in the affair was probably reprehensible.

Angus wrote:

Thinking about the greatest ever list today, it crossed my mind to apply the idea to the "powers of ten" website
(http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/index.html) recently noted in science matters email. I thought at the time that each "power" has a wealth of "science" to explore within it. Which scientist could be most highly regarded in each of the "power of ten"? Beyond Derajuin, Verwey, Landau and Overbeek for the 10-9 to 10-8, I haven't given much more thought though . . .
Peter Macinnis posted:

The problem with choosing women is that you are always looking to redress an imbalance, and so you are more inclined to accept those who are little-known but did good work, where men of the same level may be ignored.

If you don't take women who may not have achieved that much, then girls lack role modles and the same old waste of half the skills in the population goes on.  So, we need to list the doubtful ones, so we can be more choosy in the future, because there really WILl be as many good women scientists.

That said, I'm not sure that Hypatia ever actually discovered anything, I would like to include Hildegard of Bingen just to be stroppy, Mary Somerville, Margaret Sanger (but not Marie Stopes).  I would have Barbara McClintock, Mary Lyon of the Lyon Hypothesis -- a lovely old girl, still working, last I heard, Ada Lovelace, Sophie Germain, Lise Meitner, Marie Curie because of the way the bastards treated her over the alleged affair with Langevin, if nothing else, Maria Goeppert Mayer, Margaret Burbidge, Grace Hopper  . . .

Now for the unknown men: look up Joule and Herapath, and see what you think of Herapath. Look at Cannizzaro, or George Johnstone Stoney -- or Jean Perrin, who was right up there with Einstein, and is one of those nominated as a likely alternative if Einstein had not got to relativity, and a brilliant experimenter as well, who used Brownian motion to estimate the size of water molecules.

In radio, everybody mentions Marconi, a few mention Hertz, but how about Fitzgerald (he of the contraction), who explained how to do it, or James Clerk Maxwell?  They played a role as well.

And who has heard of Cavendish?  What about Schwarzschild, who, while on the Russian front, used general relativity to come up with the Schwarrzschild radius?  (BTW, I know it is about 2.5 km for Sol -- can anybody give me the actual equation in terms a simple biologist can understand?)

Joseph Henry, Fresnel, Fraunhofer, Gauss, Gay-Lussac, Davy, Faraday, Berzelius, Thomas Young, Goethe, Erasmus Darwin, Withering and the other Lunatics, just for starters.


Jim Edwards posted, in response to Tim's comments:

I am surprised that no-one has so far thought to include Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543).  If ever a scientist "thought outside the boundaries" it was he.

One might also consider Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) who championed Copernicus, William of Ockham (c.1285-c.1349) and Gregor Mendel (1822-84), all of whom wrought important changes in the history of science.


Ray wrote:

Has anyone mentioned Marie Curie?  -who I believe, ultimately gave her life for science.
How about the mouthy Kiwi called Rutherford?
Bohr, Planck, Fermi, etc...

Perhaps people who have inspired research by great thinkers, such as Jules Verne, A.C.Clark, Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein et al,.. also deserve a mention.

And someone, now completely nameless, discovered how to make fire by rubbing sticks together or by knocking rocks together.  Sometimes it is the work of these unrecorded people in history (and prehistory -by definition unrecorded) which actually make the biggest difference, like Fleming's assistant.

Peter Macinnis replied:

> unrecorded) which actually make the biggest difference, like Fleming's
> assistant.

There was no assistant -- Fleming was quite capable of screwing up on his own.

Fleming used sloppy technique, noted an effect and misclassified the effect -- which is why Florey and Chain found it in a literature search, and later on managed to claim the lion's share of the credit, and have a variety of bullshit tales told about him by Walter Winchell and André Maurois, about how he saved Winston Churchill from drowning.

Fleming married a much younger lady, late in life, and Lady Fleming for many years made it impossible for anybody willing to tell the truth about this horrendous fraud from getting access to his papers.


and later:

Sorry, busy morning -- it was FLEMING who later on managed to claim the lion's share of the credit, when he had done nothing of note.  It was FLEMING, of whom the BS tales were told.

off to mumble at self

then:

Here, from my notes, is a list of about 440 who would be on at least my B-list.  These are the scientists with whom I believe we, as appreciators of science, should have at least a nodding acquaintance,
or some degree of recognition.

There may be the odd ring-in.  Remain alert but not alarmed.

Imhotep; Thales; Pythagoras; Parmenides; Anaxagoras; Herodotus; Democritus; Thucydides; Hippocrates; Zeno of Elea; Plato; Eudoxus; Heracleides; Aristotle; Theophrastus; Epicurus; Euclid; Aristarchus of Samos; Archimedes; Eratosthenes; Hipparchus; Lucretius; Pliny the Elder; Hero of Alexandria; Ptolemy; Galen; Hypatia; Alcuin; Alhazen.

Leif Eiriksson; Avicenna; Omar Khayyam; Leonardo Fibonacci; Albertus Magnus; Roger Bacon; Marco Polo; William of Ockham; Jean Buridan; Johannes Gutenberg; Nicolas Cusanus; Aldus Manutius; Leonardo; Erasmus.

Vasco da Gama; Albrecht Dürer; Copernicus; Thomas More; Ferdinand Magellan; Paracelsus; Agricola; Vesalius; Ambroise Paré; Fabricius; William Gilbert; John Gerard; Tycho Brahe; Giordano Bruno; John Napier; Thomas Hariot; Francis Bacon; Galileo Galilei; Johann Kepler; Jan Baptista van Helmont; William Harvey; Willebrod Snell; Marin Mersenne; Thomas Hobbes; Pierre Gassendi; René Descartes; Pierre de Fermat; Otto von Guericke; Evangelista Torricelli; John Graunt; Blaise Pascal; Giovanni Cassini; Henry Oldenburg; Francesco Redi; Robert Boyle; John Ray; Marcello Malpighi; Christiaan Huygens; John Locke; Anton van Leeuwenhoek; Robert Hooke; Steno.

Isaac Newton; Ole Rømer; Gottfried Leibniz; John Flamsteed; Thomas Savery; Edward Tyson; William Dampier; Joseph de Tournefort; Edmond Halley; Thomas Newcomen; Stephen Gray; Jethro Tull; Stephen Hales; Bishop Berkeley; Gabriel Fahrenheit; Christian Goldbach; James Bradley; Pierre Bouguer; Daniel Bernoulli; Charles de La Condamine; Benjamin Franklin; Linnaeus; Leonhard Euler; Buffon; David Hume; Gilbert White; Adam Smith; John Michell; James Hutton; Daines Barrington; Oliver Goldsmith; James Cook; Joseph Black; John Wilkinson; Matthew Boulton; Johann Forster; Lazzaro Spallanzani; Josiah Wedgwood; Sir William Hamilton; Erasmus Darwin.

Henry Cavendish; Richard Arkwright; Joseph Priestley; Charles Coulomb; Joseph-Louis Lagrange; James Watt; Luigi Galvani; William Herschel; Antoine Lavoisier; Sir Joseph Banks; René Haüy; Thomas Jefferson; Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck; Alessandro Volta; Jacques Charles; Johann Bode; Claude Berthollet; John Playfair; Edward Jenner; Pierre-Simon de Laplace; Goethe; Joseph Jacquard; Count Rumford; Joseph Louis Proust; Aimé Argand; John Macadam; Thomas Telford; Caspar Wistar; Karle Willdenow; Robert Fulton; Thomas Malthus.

John Dalton; Jean-Baptiste Fourier; Georges Cuvier; William Smith; Alexander von Humboldt; Georg Hegel; Sir William Congreve; Thomas Young; Robert Brown; André Ampère; Sophie Germain; Henri Dutrochet; Amedeo Avogadro; Hans Oersted; Karl Gauss; Humphry Davy; Joseph Gay-Lussac; Mary Somerville; George Stephenson; Jöns Berzelius; David
Brewster; Pierre-Louis Dulong; William Prout; Adam Sedgwick; Sir John Franklin; Joseph von Fraunhofer; Augustin Fresnel.

Georg Ohm; Michael Faraday; Charles Babbage; Gaspard de Coriolis; John Herschel; Sir Roderick Murchison; William Whewell; Sadi Carnot; Adolphe Quételet; Charles Lyell; Joseph Henry; Macedonio Melloni; Charles Wilkes; Mary Anning; James Clark Ross; Friedrich Wöhler; Johannes Müller; Gustav Fechner; Robert Chambers; Charles Wheatstone; Victor Hugo; Christian Doppler; Justus von Liebig; Ralph Waldo Emerson; Heinrich Lenz; Matthias Schleiden; Wilhelm Weber; Richard Owen; Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

John Stuart Mill; Edward Davy; Louis Agassiz; Felix Mendelssohn; Charles Darwin; Theodor Schwann; Asa Gray; Robert Bunsen; Ludwig Leichhardt; John Snow; Claude Bernard; James Dana; Anders Ångström; Heinrich Geissler; Ada Lovelace; George Boole; Joseph Dalton Hooker; Ignaz Semmelweis; James Joule; Jean Foucault; Armand Fizeau; Sir John Tyndall; Herbert Spencer; Florence Nightingale; Hermann von Helmholtz; Gregor Mendel; Rudolf Clausius; Heinrich Schliemann.

Louis Pasteur; Francis Galton; William Siemens; Alfred Russel Wallace; Gustav Kirchhoff; Lord Kelvin; Thomas Henry Huxley; Johann Balmer; Stanislao Cannizzaro; G. Johnstone Stoney; Pierre Berthelot; John Burdon-Sanderson; Jules Verne; Joseph Swan; Friedrich Kekulé; Asaph Hall; François Raoult; James Clerk Maxwell; James Wimshurst; Sir William Crookes; Dmitri Mendeleev; Ernst Haeckel; Joseph Stefan; Norman Lockyer; Johannes van der Waals; William Perkin; Paul Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran.

Ernst Mach; Ernest Solvay; Edward Morley; Henry Stanley; Osborne Reynolds; Lord Rayleigh; James Dewar; Robert Koch ; Ludwig Boltzmann; Wilhelm Röntgen; Alexander Graham Bell; Thomas Edison; Ivan Pavlov; Lawrence Hargrave; Oliver Heaviside; George FitzGerald; Antoine Becquerel; Jacobus van't Hoff; William Ramsay; Albert Michelson; Hendrik Lorentz; Wilhelm Ostwald; Henri Poincaré; Paul Ehrlich; Johannes Rydberg; Sigmund Freud; J. J. Thomson; Nikola Tesla; Heinrich Hertz; Edward Barnard; Konstantin Tziolkovsky; Karl Pearson; Eugène Dubois; Max Planck; Pierre Curie; Jacques Loeb.

Svante Arrhenius; Herman Hollerith; William Bragg; Annie Jump Cannon; Leo Baekeland; Wilhelm Wien; Pieter Zeeman; Thomas Hunt Morgan; H. G. Wells; Marie Curie; Arnold Sommerfeld; Fritz Haber; Robert Andrews Millikan; C. T. R. Wilson; Jean Perrin; Ernest Rutherford; The Wright Brothers; Paul Langevin; Bertrand Russell; Karl Schwarzschild; Joseph Goldberger; Guglielmo Marconi; Francis Aston; G. H. Hardy; James Jeans; Oswald Avery; Frederick Soddy; Henry Norris Russell.

Lise Meitner; Albert Einstein; Max von Laue; Otto Hahn; Alfred Wegener; H. L. Mencken; Teilhard de Chardin; Clinton Davisson; Robert Goddard; Arthur Eddington; Hans Geiger; James Franck; Max Born; John Maynard Keynes; Margaret Sanger; Niels Bohr; Henry Moseley; Erwin Schrödinger; John Logie Baird; T. S. Eliot; Edwin Hubble; Karel Capek; R. A. Fisher; H. J. Muller; Lawrence Bragg; Frederick Banting; Alfred Sturtevant; James Chadwick; Arthur Compton; J. B. S. Haldane; Edward Appleton; G. P. Thomson; Louis de Broglie; Harold Urey; Albert Szent-Györgyi; Raymond Dart; Aldous Huxley; Norbert Wiener.

Peter Kapitza; Irène Joliot-Curie; John Cockcroft; P. M. S. Blackett; Leo Szilard; Howard Florey; Macfarlane Burnet; Jean Frederic Joliot-Curie; Wolfgang Pauli; Jan Oort; Enrico Fermi; Ernest Lawrence; Robert Van de Graaff; Werner Heisenberg; Linus Pauling; Mark Oliphant; P. A. M. Dirac; Karl Popper; Eugene Wigner; John von Neumann; Ernest Walton; Robert Oppenheimer; George Gamow; Otto Frisch; Salvador Dali; Pavel Cherenkov; C. P. Snow; Erwin Chargaff; Carl Anderson.

Kurt Gödel; Hans Bethe; Maria Goeppert Mayer; Grace Hopper; Rachel Carson; Hans Jensen; Hideki Yukawa; Rudolf Peierls; Lev Landau; Willard Libby; Edward Teller; Edwin Land; Jacques Monod; Dorothy Hodgkin; Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar; Luis Alvarez; John Wheeler; Alan Turing; Max Perutz; James Van Allen; Peter Medawar; Fred Hoyle; Francis Crick; Maurice Wilkins; Martin Ryle; Rosalind Franklin; Thomas Gold; Margaret Burbidge; Thomas Kuhn; Yang Chen Ning; Benoît Mandelbrot; Mary F. Lyon; Abdus Salam; Lee Tsung-Dao; Donald Glaser; James Watson; Rudolf Mössbauer; Murray Gell-Mann; Roger Penrose; Richard Dawkins; Stephen Hawking; Henry Handel Murphy.


and following a comment from Sandie Stockwell:
At 17:31 13/02/04 +1100, Sandie wrote:
>what an interesting way to approach the 'greatest ever' list!

Thanks, Sandie -- I had that to come back to and forgot.

>> l) recently noted in science matters email. I thought at the time that each
>> "power" has a wealth of "science" to explore within it. Which scientist
>> could be most highly regarded in each of the "power of ten"? Beyond
>> Derajuin, Verwey, Landau and Overbeek for the 10x-9 to 10x-8, I haven't
>> given much more thought though . . .

I think you should, Angus -- and I would be interested to see how you associate one or two of those with their order of magnitude. Off-hand, of your list, Lev Landau is the only one I recognise, and I only know about him from some stuff I read a while back in rather turgid and po-faced official Moscow translation (the sort that comes with obligatory bortsch
stains and bits of adhered turnip peel on delaminating bogroll paper in a "Moscow Foreign Languages Publishing House" typeface), and because Kapiza defended him when he was accused of being a German spy.

I could do Robert Hooke, easily enough, but I don't know about Robert Boyle.


Angus responded:

as I said in my original note "it crossed my mind" - getting to the list itself was rather more tricky. To my mind the spacial nature of the "power series" lends itself more toward those who discovered the realms outlined - eg. Copernicus for inner solar system, Kepler for outer, perhaps Einstein or Hubble for largest scale...
Landau was one of DLVO who produced extensively used theory on colloidal stability due to repulsive and attractive interactions.

Peter Macinnis replied:

>eg. Copernicus for inner solar system, Kepler for outer, perhaps Einstein or
>Hubble for largest scale...

OK, we won't press you -- yet :-)

>Landau was one of DLVO who produced extensively used theory on colloidal
>stability due to repulsive and attractive interactions.

Damn -- I followed the wrong trails!  I had dug out some stuff that Landau had done on superfluids and neutron stars.  Busy chap, what with keeping Beria off his back, and stuff.

Anne commented:

What an amazing list, I had considered looking up information on each person that list members had provided and keeping it in a folder, I now realise it will be very time consuming :-)

I would add to the list, Louis and Mary Leakey for their contributions to fossil records.  And also Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey for their work that helped us understand the animals they spent endless hours studying.

Jim Edwards wrote:

Just a few more names off the top of my head that might be worth adding to the list:

Immanuel Kant (he started out as an astronomer), Oliver Sacks (it was a nice irony when he was being interviewed by our Robyn Williams!), Ralph Alpher (you already have Bethe and Gamow), John Wilkins and Christopher Wren (founders of the Royal Society), Laurence Hargraves (as worthy of inclusion as the Wright Bros), Carl Jung (you have Freud), Leonard Woolley, William James, Henri Becquerel (and his father and grandfather), Ludwig Wittgenstein (you have Karl Popper), Gerald Durrell, David Suzuki (and perhaps even David Attenborough), James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis (for Gaia's sake) and last (and least) Carl Sagan.

Peter Macinnis replied:

>Immanuel Kant (he started out as an astronomer),

In 1755 Immanuel Kant proposed his theory that the universe formed from a spinning nebula in an infinite hierarchy, which seemed like a good idea at the time.  Other than that, dunno.

>Oliver Sacks (it was a nice
>irony when he was being interviewed by our Robyn Williams!), Ralph Alpher
>(you already have Bethe and Gamow),

Yes and yess - -I have all of Sacks' books, and discovered just last might that Alpher's first name was Ralph, which meant people probably asked him to lucerne their clothing a lot, but Jin is referring to a better joke there, where Hans Bethe was the one in absentia.

>John Wilkins and Christopher Wren
>(founders of the Royal Society),

Wilkins I had forgotten -- I discovered him last year, and quote:  A consistent moderate, Wilkins annoyed the Puritans with his protection of Anglicans, and later upset the High Churchmen with his gentle treatment of the Dissenters. Of course, his position was made sounder when he married Robina French, the widowed sister of Cromwell, but after the house of Stuart was restored, Wilkins managed to retain favour, and he was made
Bishop of Chester in 1668. Thirty years earlier, aged just 24, Wilkins had written a careful proof that there was no reason, scientific or theological, why there should not be another world, just like ours, on the moon.

>Laurence Hargraves (as worthy of inclusion
>as the Wright Bros),

Yes -- definitely -- he must have fallen off my list.  Mind you, he had some weird theories about Spaniards in Sydney Harbour, around 1600 . . .
no, he's there, correctly spelled Lawrence.

>Carl Jung (you have Freud), Leonard Woolley, William
>James,

I thought having Freud was enough.

>Henri Becquerel (and his father and grandfather),

And son . . . SURELY Antoine Henri was on my list? Yes, but for some reason, as Antoine, which is wrong.

>Ludwig Wittgenstein

Only if he sits on the steeple

>(you have Karl Popper), Gerald Durrell, David Suzuki (and perhaps even David
>Attenborough),

As great scientists, no -- as great science communicators, yes.

>James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis (for Gaia's sake) and last

These two as scientists, yes

>(and least) Carl Sagan.

at least as a communicator -- I am unsure how much original first-class science he did.  I take it the (at least) refers to his superb skewering of a fraud whose name escapes me <GDARFC>
Jim Edwards answered:
> >John Wilkins and Christopher Wren
> >(founders of the Royal Society),  {<snipped>}

Wilkins did not just manage to retain favour with the restored Stuart monarchy, he was one of the parliamentarians who were summarily sacked from Oxford by Charles II.  It was the inspiration of Sir Robert Moray, the man who organised Charles' coronation as King of Scots at Scoon in 1650, to gather together the best brains on both sides of the Civil War.  Dr John
Wilkins was the Warden of Gresham College and the chair of regular meetings with other parliamentarians who had been similarly displaced.  Moray persuaded the king to give a royal charter to a society comprising both royalists and parliamentarians, some of whom were eminent scholars and some who were rich.  Hence the Royal Society.

> >Laurence Hargraves (as worthy of inclusion
> >as the Wright Bros),    {<snipped>}

BTW I once went hiking on a long trail down on the south coast somewhere looking for a site where a Spanish ship was alleged to have run aground some time BC (before Cook).  Unfortunately the shoes were not made for bushwalking and gave out before we found the place.  Has anyone else been there?

> >Henri Becquerel (and his father and grandfather),
>And son . . . SURELY Antoine Henri was on my list? Yes, but for some
>reason, as Antoine, which is wrong.

The Grandfather was Antoine Cesar (1788-1878) who was the first to use electrolysis to separate metals from their ores.  The Father was Alexandre Edmond (1820-1891) who researched solar radiation, diamagnetism, etc., and constructed a phosphorescope.  His son Antoine Henri (1852-1908), the discoverer of Becquerel Rays, was the one who shared the Nobel prize for physics with the Curies in 1903.  Henri's son Jean was also a physicist.  Some family!


Margaret Ruwoldt observed:

>John Wilkins and Christopher Wren (founders of the Royal Society)

In "In Search of London" (1951) HV Morton remarks that the early members of the Royal Society were an influential lot: Boyle produced Boyle's Law, Hooke produced Hooke's Law, Newton produced Newton's Laws... and Wren produced London.
Peter Macinnis replied:

Si monumentum requiris, circumspice . . .  Which makes me think of a curious first year architecture assignment, that ran something like this (I may have one or two names wrong):

If you could be one of Baron Hausmann, Christopher Wren, Albert Speer, Walter Burley Griffin or Oscar Niemeyer, which would you prefer to be, and why?


Margaret Ruwoldt answered:


<cynical> WBG, of course, because he drank himself silly while Marion did all the work. </cynical>

Much of the Griffins' work in Australia has disappeared already. If I were aiming for posthumous appreciation, I'd prefer to be Wren: I expect his work will (a) survive redevelopment and (2) be appreciated in future centuries as representative of an unusual time of flourishing culcha in Europe. Judging by his output, and the kinds of roles he filled on construction projects (architect, quantity surveyor, project manager et cetera et cetera) Wren must've been one of the busiest people of the second millennium, methinks.

Assignments for architecture students do seem strange sometimes: a friend wrote a minor thesis on the (cinematic) works of Francois Truffaut, and passed fourth year on the strength of it.

There's a photographic exhibition in Melbourne this month of buildings that have won architecture awards over the years. John Gollings went around and rephotographed them, trying to reproduce the photos that appeared in the year of the original award. It's an interesting survey of how tastes and award criteria have changed over time. (The exhibition is at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, if any Melbourne natterers want to see it.)

Is architecture an applied science? Whoever thought of flying buttresses to hold up cathedral walls probably qualifies as a Great Somethingorother...

Soundwarp commented:

> Assignments for architecture students do seem strange sometimes: a friend
> wrote a minor thesis on the (cinematic) works of Francois Truffaut, and
> passed fourth year on the strength of it.

Times have obviously changed since my sister did architecture in the early 70's!

> Is architecture an applied science? Whoever thought of flying buttresses to
> hold up cathedral walls probably qualifies as a Great Somethingorother...

After 3rd year students are awarded a B.Sc.....

Peter Macinnis posted:

I am still reading last week's press releases, and this came out of the woodwork from last Friday, from a AAAS meeting.  This is the lady who later married Count Rumford, who opined that Lavoisier got the better half of the bargain (meow!)

Roald Hoffmann, of course, is a delight, as readers of "American Scientist" will well know.  I imagine some of his work has been
collected in books, but I haven't see any.  Here is the release:

*******************

Oxygen was discovered more than 230 years ago, seized center stage in the 18th century chemical revolution and is still catching fire today. Oxygen has been the subject of space missions, environmental and biological sciences and of drama.

It was also the subject of an unusual symposium, "It's All About Oxygen," today (Feb. 14) at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Seattle. Participants approached the subject from historical, theatrical and strictly scientific perspectives, including a presentation on the recent remarkable discovery of the presence of ozone in living cells, its production catalyzed by antibodies. (Ozone is a form of oxygen in which the molecule contains three atoms instead of the normal two.)

The theatrical side of oxygen is embodied in a two-act play, 'Oxygen,' by Roald Hoffmann, Nobel laureate in chemistry and the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., and Stanford chemistry professor Carl Djerassi, who discussed the play at the symposium. 'Oxygen' was written in 2000 and has had several productions in the United States, as well as England, Germany, Italy, South Korea and Japan.

Hoffmann, however, did not talk about his play at the symposium but about Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze Lavoisier, the intelligent and gifted wife of the great French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, the "father" of modern chemistry and the man incorrectly credited by many with the discovery of oxygen. (The English chemist Joseph Priestley is the true claimant.)

"Mme Lavoisier deserves an opera," Hoffmann said about his talk, "More About Mme. Lavoisier Than M. Lavoisier." To illustrate his talk, he used images from the Lavoisier Collection at the Kroch Library's Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell, the largest collection of materials on the French chemist outside of Paris. According to Cornell librarian and curator David Corson, the collection's 2,000 books and manuscripts document all aspects of Antoine Lavoisier's career, most notably his crucial work not only with oxygen but also the development of modern chemical nomenclature. Included among the manuscripts are laboratory notes from his dramatic experiments on the decomposition and recomposition of water, which helped to demonstrate the existence of oxygen and its role in chemical reactions.

A treasured piece in the collection is Mme. Lavoisier's travel case or "necessaire," which is, incidentally, a crucial and mysterious plot device in the play, 'Oxygen.' A good part of the collection documents the life of Mme. Lavoisier, allegedly a talented pupil of neoclassical French painter Jacques-Louis David. Mme. Lavoisier illustrated Antoine Lavoisier's works and translated foreign scientific literature into French for him.

However, Hoffmann asks, although Mme. Lavoisier was the wife of a scientist and was an upper-class women "of great intelligence and talent" in 18th Century France, "What opportunities were open for her to do science?"

Another symposium speaker was Richard A. Lerner, president of the Scripps Research Institute, who spoke of his research team's discovery that human antibodies produce ozone.

Hoffmann discusses the chemical implications of the findings in an article, "The Story of O," in the January edition of American Scientist, which he concludes by noting, "After the beautiful and exciting Scripps work of the last three years, I'd rather leave the final word to Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze Lavoisier, who in a recent play about the element puts it simply: 'Imagine!'"

Podargus commented:

> > Much of the Griffins' work in Australia has disappeared already.

Bugger I missed the disappearance of Canberra, didn't Aunty cover it?

Margaret Ruwoldt replied:

Some would say the original urban design has been severely compromised by later planners. The city was never meant to be so big, and adjustments had to be made.

I was thinking more of the Griffin buildings: the Australia Hotel, Capitol Theatre building (the theatre's still there, but the rest of the building has been very much degraded by later owners) and various others that have been demolished completely or had their (Griffin-designed) interiors ripped out.

Newman College here at Melbourne Uni is in pretty good nick, and I believe still has some original furniture and fittings.

Kevin Phyland wrote:

So many scientists have been mentioned I've kinda lost track but I have a few from my field of endeavour to throw into the mix for comment (all famous meteorologists - if that isn't an oxymoron...)

Vilhelm Bjerknes
Milutin Milankovitch
Theodore Fujita
Carl-Gustav Rossby

for starters...

Jim Edwards commented:

>From Stephen Hawking's "On The Shoulders Of Giants":

"Newton set out to discover the cause of the planets' elliptical motion.  By applying his own law of centrifugal force to Kepler's third law of planetary motion (the law of harmonies) he deduced the inverse-square law, which states that the force of gravity between any two objects is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the objects' centres. . .   it was an exchange of letters in 1679 with his old adversary Hooke that renewed his interest in the problem.  This time he turned his attention to Kepler's second law, the law of equal areas, which Newton was able to prove held true because of centripetal force.  Hooke, too, was attempting to explain the planetary orbits, and some of his letters on that account were of particular interest to Newton.

"At an infamous gathering in 1684, three members of the Royal Society, Robert Hooke, Edmond Halley, and Christopher Wren, . . . engaged in a heated discussion about the inverse-square relation governing the motion of planets.  . . .  Hooke declared that he had derived from Kepler's law of ellipses the proof that gravity was an emanating force, but would withhold it from Halley and Wren until he was ready to make it public.  Furious, Halley went to Cambridge, told Newton Hooke's claim, and proposed the following problem.  'What would be the form of a planet's orbit about the sun if it were drawn towards the sun by a force that varied inversely as the square of the distance?'  Newton's response was staggering.  'It would be an ellipse,' he answered immediately, and then told Halley that he had solved the problem four years earlier but had misplaced the proof in his office.

"At Halley's request, Newton spent three months reconstituting and improving the proof. . . . he further developed these ideas until they filled three volumes. . . .  The three books of Newton's Principia provided the link between Kepler's laws and the physical world. . . .

"However, Newton's nemesis, Robert Hooke, had threatened to spoil any coronation Newton might have enjoyed.  After Book 2 appeared, Hooke publicly claimed that the letters he had written in 1679 had provided scientific ideas that were vital to Newton's discoveries.  His claims, though not without merit, were abhorrent to Newton, who vowed to delay or even abandon publication of Book 3.  Newton ultimately relented and published the final book of the Principia, but not before painstakingly removing from it every mention of Hooke's name.

"Newton's hatred for Hooke consumed him for years afterward.  . . .  He withdrew from the Royal Society until Hooke's death in 1703, then was elected its president and reelected each year until his own death in 1727.  He also withheld publication of Opticks, . . . until after Hooke was dead."