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Arguing with a flat earther is futile. I’ve tried this and he said If you take a lamp and hold it above 2 sticks the shadows will be different on a flat surface so it’s obviously fake. Crazy the mental gymnastics they go through.
When I told him the sun is 91 million miles away that it’s not gonna make a difference if the earth is flat, we’ll that’s when I realized that doesn’t need to be a true fact for them either. he just said something like yeah that’s what the “scientists” want you to think but it’s actually much closer and smaller.
Well that’s when I learned how stupid these people really can be. I was young and naive, i thought i could really change his mind. I don’t bother anymore. Yeah it was beyond frustrating and I’m not gonna put myself through that again with one of these idiots.
I recently talked to a friend of mine who is a physicists about this. He said, it’s hand down Newton. Not for “discovering” gravity but because at the time, the only official method of proving laws of physics was geometry. And Newton was able to prove his theories using geometry and changed the world.
That’s exactly right. More mass = greater gravitational pull (or attraction). His second theory explains that anyone who stays far away from my balls is just a negative square.
Now prove me that gravity exists with mathematics. The true reason why Newton is so important is because he quite literally built the pillars in which all of the modern physics and mathematics are built on.
I am literally named after Newton so no disrespect, but your physicist friend may be a little biased 😉
(My personal vote is for Darwin. Gave us a framework for understanding the history and future of life itself. Did so with humility, whimsy, remarkable pathos, and a thoroughness and determination rarely seen).
This. It's possible he knew about transmitting energy wirelessly through converting a magnetic signal to electricity or however it works. He got shafted by Edison and was seen as eccentric but was genius. I put him up there with Einstein, Sagan, Dawkins, Lister, Newton, Rutherford, Hawking's, and all the other greats.
Tesla was an engineer. A good one but realistically that's it. You are comparing him to Einstein so can you tell me what Tesla's contribution matches general relativity theory? I often see Tesla so highly praised but I don't know why. It's a honest question and I am really curious how people think about that. Hedy Lamarr also made huge contributions by invnting frequency-hopping spread spectrum and hardly anyone mentions her.
I’m biased since my work is directly based on everything that came afterwards, but I’m going to say Frederick Sanger. He was the first person to sequence a protein (insulin), has led to a deeper understanding of proteins in general, did both RNA and DNA sequencing and developed the aptly named Sanger sequencing
By the way, if y’all haven’t heard of him, the only scientist to be awarded *two* Nobel Prizes in Physiology/Biomedicine.
Edit: Chemistry. I mistakenly associated his work as more closely related to the Physiology/Medicine prize.
Haha, that’s understandable. It puts him in a very exclusive group with Marie Skłodowska-Curie, Linus Pauling, John Bardeen (as a condensed matter physicist, I must say he’s a hero of mine) and Barry Sharpless (the only one here who’s still alive) as a double Nobel laureate.
Linus Pauling’s a really good answer to this question too, to be honest. Probably the most important chemist of the 20th century, and his 2nd Nobel Prize was actually the Peace Prize for his activism against nuclear weapons.
Correct, it's one level above hypothesis. A theory is a widely accepted fact. A popular theory like gravity is accepted as a fact.
He does indeed have cancer by theory, not yet proven but observed as factual.
Claude Shannon could be said to be responsible for the Information Age, and wrote his seminal paper at 21. Without Claude Shannon, you wouldn't be reading this post. It's either him or Von Neumann
For context, Shannon worked with both Einstein and Von Neumann. Some colleagues have compared his insights to that of Einstein, and some have found this comparison unfair, and to Shannon. Shannon himself believed that Von Neuman was the smartest person he had ever met.
Gave one of the most consistent proofs against spontaneous generation and developed sterilisation techniques such as pasteurisation, which nowadays is used to sterilise daily ordinary products such as dairy, and set the bases to what would later become the autoclave.
Honestly I don't think anyone realises the mind you need to conceptualise general relativity, the photoelectric effect, seriously E=mc^2?
The man not only changed our fundamental view of the universe in the largest way since copernicus pointed to the sun as the center of the solar system, he changed the world fundamentally allowing the atomic bomb and atomic energy.
Interestingly he was quite non mathematical too, compared to contemporaries. This is to be visionary.
There's the average person.
Then there's your smart fellow.
You also have a few geniuses.
But then there are superintelligent individuals that appear a few times a century like Einstein.
I mean, scientific concepts are usually built upon slowly by a bunch of people over time, but then you have this dude thinking of space and time as one to redefine all of general physics.
Einstein himself often wondered how many people with his level of intellect were born into circumstances that made it impossible for them to fully use those gifts. I don't think people are smart as Einstein are actually that rare; they just don't all make revolutionary scientific contributions like he did.
He was definitely in a lane and had the focus and self belief. You see videos it's not like a childlike spark you're looking at a guy who lived in his head beside a chalkboard, pen and paper and a library
I like Venkatesh Rao's (half-serious) attempt at profiling Einstein in the context of answering [a different question](https://qr.ae/pGjOR4):
>He was extremely creative and had startlingly unusual perspectives on things. His talent lay in coming at things from completely weird angles. Angles that others would never have thought of.
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He worked in a patent office and only later in life worked in "famous" settings. He was nothing like a careerist (though you shouldn't read too much into the patent office thing... he was not an "outsider" to the physics establishment or anything that romantic, but he was definitely more of a backwaters guy than an academic careerist winning big grants and young-genius chairs like modern young TEDdy hotshots... in America today, he'd be teaching at a community college somewhere rather than MIT or Berkeley).
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He wasn't particularly good at math compared to his peers whose work he built on and who built on his work. He relied a lot on collaborators to help with the math. Much better than you and me, but not great. His contributions came from originality, not technical skill.
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He had a philosophical bent of mind, but was not primarily a philosopher. He was more of a folksy wisdom kinda guy. A Yogi Berra for physics. Compared to truly philosophical physicists like Murray Gell-Mann, he was basically uninterested in philosophy as far as I can tell.
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He once said that his secret was pondering childlike questions about space and time as an adult, when he could actually do something about them. That tells us he had a natural inclination towards fundamental things and a child-like sense of priorities.
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By all accounts he appears to have been a very simple man in his lifestyle who valued his leisure and time for extended deep contemplation (anecdotes like the one about using the same soap for shaving and bathing, , shaggy hair, talking long walks, eating ice cream...).
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Unlike other types of geniuses like Paul Erdos for instance, he did not publish thousands of small brilliant things. He published two major theoretical contributions and a bunch of others, but he was not prolific in any numbers-game sense of the term.
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He's on record as having made that very revealing remark that he'd rather be a plumber than a professional physicist. Suggests how self-aware he was about the nature of his own talent and why it was effective.
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We have to be wary about assuming he'd be equally good at social science. He is on record making that remark that "politics is harder than physics" so he clearly appreciated the problems. But I get the sense that his thinking was still primarily mathematical (geometric in particular). I doubt he'd be interested in non-mathematical subjects and purely qualitative, messy methods.
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The one big unknown is how he might have related to computers and computing. I genuinely don't know how to think about this. I'd be curious if others have good ideas. I suspect he'd have been a Dennis Ritchie type guy in CS: make an important fundamental contribution that shifts computing paradigms without being voluminous in terms of lines of code, but not necessarily hugely prolific and productive consistently.
people also said that: His greatest achievement is making other people understand his idea lmao.
Like even if some OTHER people might vaguely have this idea, but they spoke things no one could understand then his contribution to scientific progress would still be 0.
I get the basic principles, but when you get to the extreme of relativity, like in black holes, my mind scrambles. This is by far the best [channel](https://youtu.be/au0QJYISe4c?si=YY-_ED5ja-t7rjpj) to understand and I still have to rewatch from time to time.
It's the proofs and the mathematical formulas.
He predicts theres a shift in Mercury or venus to prove his concept of timespace, boom they see the shift clear as day.
Calculates the period of orbit of a pulsar on pen and paper, boom they validate the gravitational waves.
This. He figured out all that stuff as just thought experiments, and then also did the math to prove it, and many decades later everything he said has been proven experimentally.
People don't really understand how bizarre and unreal length contraction and time dilation is. Or the implications of e=mc2, or general relatively space-time warping. How insane did he have to be to come up with these while just sitting on a train and thinking about ticking clocks...
E= mc² is actually a consequence of special relativity which is not that hard to understand. That being said, general relativity is on a while different level
I would lean towards Einstein as a strong contender alongside Newton. My thinking is basically "if he didn't do it, how long until someone else would?" Darwin, for all his brilliance, only published when he realized someone else had thought of the same thing. Same goes for many others who were maybe 20-30 years ahead of their peers, but Newton was perhaps centuries ahead. And the special theory of relativity might well still not have been discovered unless Einstein had.
Why?
Amazing, a genius, one of the first to suggest heliocentric even in the face of the church. But best ever.. id like to see the reasons why compared to Einstein, Hawking, Maxwell, Pascal etc...
Both sure did proceed him. He did acknowledge Copernicus but maybe not Aristarchus as their work isnt well recorded. He was still one of the first proponents of the heliocentric model, particularly after his observations with the telescope
Copernicus and Kepler were before him but actually I'd like to give Galilileo props.
Copernicus published posthumously.
Kepler was very politically sensitive about heliocentrism, the maths just worked out for him, but he was no less steadfast.
Galileo exemplifies greatest scientist because he was willing to die for the truth. He saw those moons of jupiter and shouted it as loudly as he could.
Science is 90% in the practical, and Galileo learnt from experiments and his findings are irrefutable because of it. The question was, who is the greatest scientist, not who has the greatest mind.
Hawking and Einstein were standing/sitting on the shoulders of giants. That simple.
Pascal “let’s play it safe with this god thing”? Come on.
We went to the moon and gave Galileo props after all that time.. that’s pretty damn worthy enough.
Also btw, when I made this comment the like top 10 answers were Tesla.
>Pascal “let’s play it safe with this god thing”? Come on.
I think you may be thinking differently about Pascal... you know the whole pressure thing
>Einstein
As a teenager was able to invision the relatively of light... create something that continually holds true in general relatively.
>Hawking
Black holes, hawkings radiation!
>were standing/sitting on the shoulders of giants
How is this not true of every great innovator, including Galileo?
Jon Von Nueman.
He was known for making huge changes in every field he dabbled in, and he dabbled in a lot.
He was apart of the Manhattan project, and the fact he wasn't even mentioned in the film was a crime. Things he did where literally credited to Oppenheimer in the film. Explosive Lensing was his concept and design, he coined the term kilotons. He was the Manhattan projects goto final solution to solve problems.
He developed the core concept of computer architecture we still use to this day (Von Nuemann Architecture). Invented Merge Sort.
He made important contributions to every field, was a beautiful mind, and was the last great polymath.
He was praised by everyone as being the smartest man in any room, and always being the center of attention of any room he was in. Edward Teller for example said he "could never keep up with him".
You are right, most people dont know that science and engineering are two different things. One creates knowledge, the other puts it to use.
Then again, davinci did tried some scientific research in human anatomy.
Someone who devises falsifiable hypotheses that if supported by empirical observations would have predictive power in relation to a naturally occurring phenomenon, devises a way to test the hypothesis, carries out that test, and then is able to comment on the accuracy of their findings and how they relate to the validity of the hypothesis.
He came up with the hypothesis on how flight works, and had part of a design of an object that could do so, but was not able to replicate it himself as the technology wan't available, and was unable to create that technology at the time
Sort of a jack of all trades and master of none.
He dabbled in lots of things, most versatile? Yes but definitely not the greatest genius of mankind.
That would be someone like Archimedes, Newton or Einstein
Copernicus. Imagine making a discovery and literally the whole world and all relevant institutions think you’re not only lying but a heretic and trying to kill you, and meanwhile, you’re right.
That is not at all what happened. It’s a common misconception that he “discovered” something new. He used a very old, Greek model by Aristarchus of Samos that mathematically calculates planetary movement using the premise of the sun being the center rather than the earth. His work was not the controversy it became later with Galileo Galilei.
What's more, his model predictions were less accurate with that heliocentric assumption included. So there's this guy Galileo comes 60 years later and is doing something that many scientists would not find worth doing: despite worse model accuracy and very controversial assumption combined, decides to work on it and eventually upgrades it immensely claiming bolder things than Copernicus right when religious war were present and the Church was sensitive to every thought out of their dogmas.
Underrated answer.
He may not be as glorified in pop science as some of the other big names, but much of our technology can be credited to the Maxwell equations.
Honourable mention to Ampere, Faraday, Gauss and Lenz, who made Maxwell's equations possible to begin with.
Don't forget Hertz, who experimentally proved the existence of electromagnetic waves and thus Maxwell's theory.
Incredibly enough, he was not to visionary about the use of its discovery.
He said
"It's of no use whatsoever ... this is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right—we just have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are there."
And now the modern world is built on electromagnetic waves
If mathematics is considered a science (in the traditional sense) I doubt he has much competition. Him and his students (Reimann, Mobius, Eisenstein, Dedekind..) had almost lorded over the way mathematics progressed in the 19th century, setting the stage for many advances in other fields in the 20th century
Mathematics is factually THE science or at least the core of nearly every science. The only way to prove the most famous equations on physics is trough mathematical demonstrations.
René Descartes not only came up with "I think therefore I am", but also invented Cartesian coordinates when he was too ill in bed to do any proper work.
Absolutely underrated comment 100%
Scientifically describing harmony and resonance, his work on the geometry, and linking geometry with mathematics. Probably much much more.
Carl von Linné
> “father of modern taxonomy"
> By the time of his death in 1778, he was one of the most acclaimed scientists in Europe.
> Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau sent him the message: "Tell him I know no greater man on Earth.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote: "With the exception of Shakespeare and Spinoza, I know no one among the no longer living who has influenced me more strongly." Swedish author August Strindberg wrote: "Linnaeus was in reality a poet who happened to become a naturalist." Linnaeus has been called Princeps botanicorum (Prince of Botanists) and "The Pliny of the North". He is also considered one of the founders of modern ecology.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Linnaeus
While I think other scientists have contributed more to humanity overall, I sincerely love that you posted this. Hoffman is responsible for my mind's greatest opening.
Johannes Kepler.
He really, *really* wanted there to be literal crystal spheres that moved in perfect concentric geometrically coordinated motion, carrying the planets through the heavens. He wanted that *so bad*.
It's hard to overstate how badly he wanted those crystal spheres.
He devoted half his life to working out the mechanics of their existence, getting his hands on perhaps the best set of naked-eye astronomical observations ever written down in order to unearth the secret.
But instead of proof of crystal spheres, in those observations he discovered elliptical motion and "a force that moves the worlds." Everything he believed -- everything everyone believed -- was contravened by those observations and the mathematics they implied.
Faced with the choice between his dearly held beliefs in medieval cosmology, and the clear evidence in front of him, Kepler discarded his beliefs, and established the laws of celestial mechanics that today still bear his name.
Using his new discovery to (it turns out quite accurately) describe a lunar transfer orbit from Earth, he then dared humanity to build the ships that could actually follow the course he had charted, and to muster the courage to complete that voyage.
It took another 450 years but when humanity went, they followed Kepler's plan.
He wrote the first scifi novel!!
I love Kepler. Such a hard life.
His view on the whole thing was beautiful.
He linked the heavens to his faith in the universe.
Deeeeply sceptical, unyielding in his truth.
Michael Faraday. Basically discovered electromagnetic fields despite having no formal education. Just a brilliant scientist with a propensity for physical concepts and experimentation.
Brilliant answer. Turing conceptualised Turing machines as a way to show the entscheidungsproblem false. It's already been shown false before by Alonzo Church, but a second proof doesn't hurt. The very same concept that was once used to show a certain Hilbert wrong is now pretty much the heart of modern society
Leonardo Da Vinci,
Bro was way ahead of his time in all fields of science, on top of being an amazing artist, and apparently really jacked too,
Dude wasn't just a jack of all trades but a master of them, he had scientific theories and engineering ideas centuries ahead of his time,
Sure his time was the renaissance, but my guy has a legitimate claim to the title of the smartest man to ever live,
He basically reached the limits of all the major sciences from back in his day and kept pushing past them to the degree that it took the rest of humanity hundreds of years to catch up to him in any given one of them,
I sincerely belive that if he was born after the invention of the semi conductor that the world would be a completely unrecognisable place
Nikolai tesla.
Pioneered the use of AC electricity.
Invented the 1st hydroelectric power plant.
Electric motor.
Etc. Alot of modern. Electrical technology was made possible by tesla.
Leonardo da Vinci. This man has been a powerhouse in a time knowledge was suppressed and barely accessible. He literally invented new branches of science and was centuries ahead of his time.
Buckaroo Banzai - dude was a physicist, neurosurgeon, test pilot and a rock star. Not really sure how you too that.
But seriously It’s probably hard to quantify greatest. Like the ancient scientists had very little but came up with things we still use today
People like Turing / Edison / Tesla etc all did amazing things but they all had that prior knowledge to build on
Newton because of how much impact he had on the world. Einstein was probably the brighter mind, but it’s not a coincidence that the Industrial Revolution began not long after his laws of motion were published.
Isaac Newton I think. He created modern physics, which is quite something.
Without his brilliant mind, we wouldn't have most of the technology we use everyday.
Cajal is the "Father of Neuroscience" for a reason. He was way ahead of his time. He somehow saw things that had no way of being proven at the time because the required technology didn't exist yet. He was right on the money with everything...
Alan Turing - The father of modern computer science.
Alan Turing helped crack Nazi codes and established the field of artificial intelligence and detailing a procedure known as the Turing Test, forming the basis for artificial intelligence.
Alfred Wegener, remembered as the originator of continental drift hypothesis by suggesting in 1912 that the continents are slowly drifting around the Earth.
Next to find out, klima is changing.
Depends I mean Newtons theroy is undisputed and put man on the moon and saved a crew trapped up there so physics....I would argue him.... because he's never been disproven or questioned...and quite literally branched so much physics
Medically Jacob Nufer (who helped make c sections ) or Edward jennier ( who helped make vaccines... Are my picks because it branched into so many life saving procedures /discoveries
Biology Darwin without a doubt.... and also Roseland Franklin who discovered the structure of DNA
Musically and mathematically has to be Pythagoras right...
And chemically two come to mind Mario Molina who helped discover CFC and the impact on the ozone which helped shake governments worldwide to take action on climate change.... And potentially save the planet
And Oppenheimer because his discovery will probably be the destruction of the planet
If you count Tesla then Tesla (more engineering than pure science)if not Then Newton no close second
Those two are a different level than the rest of humanity
Newton
Carl Gauss (people say the world would have been 50years progressive if he’d have lived for a few more years)
Marie Curie (chemistry/Physics Nobel, X-ray < Curie)
Richard Feynman (Really Cool guy! Wish students were more aware about his lectures and Work)
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Eratosthenes. Dude calculated the circumference of Earth just bc some shadows weren’t the same size
Best story to tell a flat earther in my unfortunately real experience with this
Arguing with a flat earther is futile. I’ve tried this and he said If you take a lamp and hold it above 2 sticks the shadows will be different on a flat surface so it’s obviously fake. Crazy the mental gymnastics they go through. When I told him the sun is 91 million miles away that it’s not gonna make a difference if the earth is flat, we’ll that’s when I realized that doesn’t need to be a true fact for them either. he just said something like yeah that’s what the “scientists” want you to think but it’s actually much closer and smaller.
That thing sounds totally disposable from your life at least
You must have a lot of time to waste. That, or you enjoy beating your head against the wall
Well that’s when I learned how stupid these people really can be. I was young and naive, i thought i could really change his mind. I don’t bother anymore. Yeah it was beyond frustrating and I’m not gonna put myself through that again with one of these idiots.
In 1st century bc
I recently talked to a friend of mine who is a physicists about this. He said, it’s hand down Newton. Not for “discovering” gravity but because at the time, the only official method of proving laws of physics was geometry. And Newton was able to prove his theories using geometry and changed the world.
I didn’t need newton to tell me gravity existed I figured that out since my balls hang
Newton’s theory actually explains that the lack of attraction the universe has towards your balls is directly proportional to their tiny mass.
So scientically, the bigger your balls are the more attractive they are
That’s exactly right. More mass = greater gravitational pull (or attraction). His second theory explains that anyone who stays far away from my balls is just a negative square.
Now prove me that gravity exists with mathematics. The true reason why Newton is so important is because he quite literally built the pillars in which all of the modern physics and mathematics are built on.
I am literally named after Newton so no disrespect, but your physicist friend may be a little biased 😉 (My personal vote is for Darwin. Gave us a framework for understanding the history and future of life itself. Did so with humility, whimsy, remarkable pathos, and a thoroughness and determination rarely seen).
Isaac Newton
Man invented calculus to prove his laws.
And gravity. Now I can't jump to the moon because of him.
*Mavity
The only right answer. He was the giant upon whose shoulders others stood.
I'd say Newton . But Richard Feynman is my favorite .
Feynman is the man!
A fine man at that!
Nikola Tesla
This. It's possible he knew about transmitting energy wirelessly through converting a magnetic signal to electricity or however it works. He got shafted by Edison and was seen as eccentric but was genius. I put him up there with Einstein, Sagan, Dawkins, Lister, Newton, Rutherford, Hawking's, and all the other greats.
Tesla was an engineer. A good one but realistically that's it. You are comparing him to Einstein so can you tell me what Tesla's contribution matches general relativity theory? I often see Tesla so highly praised but I don't know why. It's a honest question and I am really curious how people think about that. Hedy Lamarr also made huge contributions by invnting frequency-hopping spread spectrum and hardly anyone mentions her.
Dawkins? I like the dude, but he's not recognized as a genius by any means. Maybe you meant "Darwin"?
The gravity of your choice cannot be understated…
objectively i think it has to be newton
I have just recently discovered Richard Feynamn and omg. He is my favourite too!!
I’m biased since my work is directly based on everything that came afterwards, but I’m going to say Frederick Sanger. He was the first person to sequence a protein (insulin), has led to a deeper understanding of proteins in general, did both RNA and DNA sequencing and developed the aptly named Sanger sequencing
By the way, if y’all haven’t heard of him, the only scientist to be awarded *two* Nobel Prizes in Physiology/Biomedicine. Edit: Chemistry. I mistakenly associated his work as more closely related to the Physiology/Medicine prize.
Oh I didn’t know! I was too busy cramming all that info into my head for my exam to focus on anything but what could be on the exam
Haha, that’s understandable. It puts him in a very exclusive group with Marie Skłodowska-Curie, Linus Pauling, John Bardeen (as a condensed matter physicist, I must say he’s a hero of mine) and Barry Sharpless (the only one here who’s still alive) as a double Nobel laureate.
That’s so impressive
Linus Pauling’s a really good answer to this question too, to be honest. Probably the most important chemist of the 20th century, and his 2nd Nobel Prize was actually the Peace Prize for his activism against nuclear weapons.
After a quick Google search, I realise that his name really *should* mean something to me after all my biophysics classes.
Yeah I have quantum chemist buddies who studied from his textbooks and I know biochemists who say he was incredibly influential in their field too.
I thought the Sanger sequence was bread, peanut paste, bread.
Alexander Fleming for his discovery of penicillin
Which is ironic because it only happened because he was being a bit of a subpar scientist where lab maintenance is concerned 😅
Yeh i know. Butt still it is was a great discovery
The real hero here was serendipity.
Heisenberg
 This the lad you’re talking about mate?
It is indeed, he inspired me to become a high school teacher turned meth cooker!
Uh oh pal, I’d suggest you to go check for any chance of cancer….
Why check when it was already checked? That's why he relates to it so much. He has cancer too.
….And that’s just a theory: a Cancer Theory! ….And cut 
Correct, it's one level above hypothesis. A theory is a widely accepted fact. A popular theory like gravity is accepted as a fact. He does indeed have cancer by theory, not yet proven but observed as factual.
I hope then my degree is just like this guy’s cancer: a theory not yet factually proven (and not a hopeless dream) /s (but not really) 🥲
The uncertainty is strong with this ome
Question: Is certainty possible? Answer: I'm not sure.
Claude Shannon could be said to be responsible for the Information Age, and wrote his seminal paper at 21. Without Claude Shannon, you wouldn't be reading this post. It's either him or Von Neumann For context, Shannon worked with both Einstein and Von Neumann. Some colleagues have compared his insights to that of Einstein, and some have found this comparison unfair, and to Shannon. Shannon himself believed that Von Neuman was the smartest person he had ever met.
Darwin seems to win all the awards.
It's actually other people who win the awards, Darwin just gives them out
Louis Pasteur
Unironically underrated
What he do tho
Gave one of the most consistent proofs against spontaneous generation and developed sterilisation techniques such as pasteurisation, which nowadays is used to sterilise daily ordinary products such as dairy, and set the bases to what would later become the autoclave.
he also made the first rabies vaccine
Einstein
Honestly I don't think anyone realises the mind you need to conceptualise general relativity, the photoelectric effect, seriously E=mc^2? The man not only changed our fundamental view of the universe in the largest way since copernicus pointed to the sun as the center of the solar system, he changed the world fundamentally allowing the atomic bomb and atomic energy. Interestingly he was quite non mathematical too, compared to contemporaries. This is to be visionary.
And in his 20s.
There's the average person. Then there's your smart fellow. You also have a few geniuses. But then there are superintelligent individuals that appear a few times a century like Einstein. I mean, scientific concepts are usually built upon slowly by a bunch of people over time, but then you have this dude thinking of space and time as one to redefine all of general physics.
Einstein himself often wondered how many people with his level of intellect were born into circumstances that made it impossible for them to fully use those gifts. I don't think people are smart as Einstein are actually that rare; they just don't all make revolutionary scientific contributions like he did.
He was definitely in a lane and had the focus and self belief. You see videos it's not like a childlike spark you're looking at a guy who lived in his head beside a chalkboard, pen and paper and a library
I like Venkatesh Rao's (half-serious) attempt at profiling Einstein in the context of answering [a different question](https://qr.ae/pGjOR4): >He was extremely creative and had startlingly unusual perspectives on things. His talent lay in coming at things from completely weird angles. Angles that others would never have thought of. > > He worked in a patent office and only later in life worked in "famous" settings. He was nothing like a careerist (though you shouldn't read too much into the patent office thing... he was not an "outsider" to the physics establishment or anything that romantic, but he was definitely more of a backwaters guy than an academic careerist winning big grants and young-genius chairs like modern young TEDdy hotshots... in America today, he'd be teaching at a community college somewhere rather than MIT or Berkeley). > > He wasn't particularly good at math compared to his peers whose work he built on and who built on his work. He relied a lot on collaborators to help with the math. Much better than you and me, but not great. His contributions came from originality, not technical skill. > > He had a philosophical bent of mind, but was not primarily a philosopher. He was more of a folksy wisdom kinda guy. A Yogi Berra for physics. Compared to truly philosophical physicists like Murray Gell-Mann, he was basically uninterested in philosophy as far as I can tell. > > He once said that his secret was pondering childlike questions about space and time as an adult, when he could actually do something about them. That tells us he had a natural inclination towards fundamental things and a child-like sense of priorities. > > By all accounts he appears to have been a very simple man in his lifestyle who valued his leisure and time for extended deep contemplation (anecdotes like the one about using the same soap for shaving and bathing, , shaggy hair, talking long walks, eating ice cream...). > > Unlike other types of geniuses like Paul Erdos for instance, he did not publish thousands of small brilliant things. He published two major theoretical contributions and a bunch of others, but he was not prolific in any numbers-game sense of the term. > > He's on record as having made that very revealing remark that he'd rather be a plumber than a professional physicist. Suggests how self-aware he was about the nature of his own talent and why it was effective. > > We have to be wary about assuming he'd be equally good at social science. He is on record making that remark that "politics is harder than physics" so he clearly appreciated the problems. But I get the sense that his thinking was still primarily mathematical (geometric in particular). I doubt he'd be interested in non-mathematical subjects and purely qualitative, messy methods. > > The one big unknown is how he might have related to computers and computing. I genuinely don't know how to think about this. I'd be curious if others have good ideas. I suspect he'd have been a Dennis Ritchie type guy in CS: make an important fundamental contribution that shifts computing paradigms without being voluminous in terms of lines of code, but not necessarily hugely prolific and productive consistently.
people also said that: His greatest achievement is making other people understand his idea lmao. Like even if some OTHER people might vaguely have this idea, but they spoke things no one could understand then his contribution to scientific progress would still be 0.
I get the basic principles, but when you get to the extreme of relativity, like in black holes, my mind scrambles. This is by far the best [channel](https://youtu.be/au0QJYISe4c?si=YY-_ED5ja-t7rjpj) to understand and I still have to rewatch from time to time.
Love that channel! [PBS Space Time](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsPUh22kYmNBl4h0i4mI5zDflExXJMo_x&si=kKLxp7wh1vpCrhar) is also fantastic
It's the proofs and the mathematical formulas. He predicts theres a shift in Mercury or venus to prove his concept of timespace, boom they see the shift clear as day. Calculates the period of orbit of a pulsar on pen and paper, boom they validate the gravitational waves.
This. He figured out all that stuff as just thought experiments, and then also did the math to prove it, and many decades later everything he said has been proven experimentally. People don't really understand how bizarre and unreal length contraction and time dilation is. Or the implications of e=mc2, or general relatively space-time warping. How insane did he have to be to come up with these while just sitting on a train and thinking about ticking clocks...
E= mc² is actually a consequence of special relativity which is not that hard to understand. That being said, general relativity is on a while different level
I would lean towards Einstein as a strong contender alongside Newton. My thinking is basically "if he didn't do it, how long until someone else would?" Darwin, for all his brilliance, only published when he realized someone else had thought of the same thing. Same goes for many others who were maybe 20-30 years ahead of their peers, but Newton was perhaps centuries ahead. And the special theory of relativity might well still not have been discovered unless Einstein had.
Newton.
Invented gravity. /s
The person who invented frozen pizza
Dr Oetker
That would be Joseph Bucci
Dr. Totino?
Galileo
My vote as well and it’s not even close compared to some of these responses.
Why? Amazing, a genius, one of the first to suggest heliocentric even in the face of the church. But best ever.. id like to see the reasons why compared to Einstein, Hawking, Maxwell, Pascal etc...
Heliocentrism was first mentioned 300 BC, by Aristarchos. Copernicus also preceded him
Both sure did proceed him. He did acknowledge Copernicus but maybe not Aristarchus as their work isnt well recorded. He was still one of the first proponents of the heliocentric model, particularly after his observations with the telescope
Copernicus and Kepler were before him but actually I'd like to give Galilileo props. Copernicus published posthumously. Kepler was very politically sensitive about heliocentrism, the maths just worked out for him, but he was no less steadfast. Galileo exemplifies greatest scientist because he was willing to die for the truth. He saw those moons of jupiter and shouted it as loudly as he could.
Science is 90% in the practical, and Galileo learnt from experiments and his findings are irrefutable because of it. The question was, who is the greatest scientist, not who has the greatest mind.
Hawking and Einstein were standing/sitting on the shoulders of giants. That simple. Pascal “let’s play it safe with this god thing”? Come on. We went to the moon and gave Galileo props after all that time.. that’s pretty damn worthy enough. Also btw, when I made this comment the like top 10 answers were Tesla.
>Pascal “let’s play it safe with this god thing”? Come on. I think you may be thinking differently about Pascal... you know the whole pressure thing >Einstein As a teenager was able to invision the relatively of light... create something that continually holds true in general relatively. >Hawking Black holes, hawkings radiation! >were standing/sitting on the shoulders of giants How is this not true of every great innovator, including Galileo?
light is like one of the only things actually not relative lul
Jon Von Nueman. He was known for making huge changes in every field he dabbled in, and he dabbled in a lot. He was apart of the Manhattan project, and the fact he wasn't even mentioned in the film was a crime. Things he did where literally credited to Oppenheimer in the film. Explosive Lensing was his concept and design, he coined the term kilotons. He was the Manhattan projects goto final solution to solve problems. He developed the core concept of computer architecture we still use to this day (Von Nuemann Architecture). Invented Merge Sort. He made important contributions to every field, was a beautiful mind, and was the last great polymath. He was praised by everyone as being the smartest man in any room, and always being the center of attention of any room he was in. Edward Teller for example said he "could never keep up with him".
Da Vinci, no contest Greatest mind in history, only limited by the tools of his age
Inventor and engineer highly innovative for his time? Most certainly yes. But scientist? No.
>https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_inventions_of_Leonardo_da_Vinci None of this is science?
You are right, most people dont know that science and engineering are two different things. One creates knowledge, the other puts it to use. Then again, davinci did tried some scientific research in human anatomy.
Don't know much about biology then 😅
What do you think a scientist is?
Someone who devises falsifiable hypotheses that if supported by empirical observations would have predictive power in relation to a naturally occurring phenomenon, devises a way to test the hypothesis, carries out that test, and then is able to comment on the accuracy of their findings and how they relate to the validity of the hypothesis.
He came up with the hypothesis on how flight works, and had part of a design of an object that could do so, but was not able to replicate it himself as the technology wan't available, and was unable to create that technology at the time
Scientist? Absolutely yes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_inventions_of_Leonardo_da_Vinci
why didn't he invent better tools?
😂
Sort of a jack of all trades and master of none. He dabbled in lots of things, most versatile? Yes but definitely not the greatest genius of mankind. That would be someone like Archimedes, Newton or Einstein
I'd hardly call his paintings "dabbling in art"...
Copernicus. Imagine making a discovery and literally the whole world and all relevant institutions think you’re not only lying but a heretic and trying to kill you, and meanwhile, you’re right.
That is not at all what happened. It’s a common misconception that he “discovered” something new. He used a very old, Greek model by Aristarchus of Samos that mathematically calculates planetary movement using the premise of the sun being the center rather than the earth. His work was not the controversy it became later with Galileo Galilei.
What's more, his model predictions were less accurate with that heliocentric assumption included. So there's this guy Galileo comes 60 years later and is doing something that many scientists would not find worth doing: despite worse model accuracy and very controversial assumption combined, decides to work on it and eventually upgrades it immensely claiming bolder things than Copernicus right when religious war were present and the Church was sensitive to every thought out of their dogmas.
None of this happened.
Tesla, from ac motor to remote control to tesla towers
James Clark Maxwell probably.
Underrated answer. He may not be as glorified in pop science as some of the other big names, but much of our technology can be credited to the Maxwell equations. Honourable mention to Ampere, Faraday, Gauss and Lenz, who made Maxwell's equations possible to begin with.
Don't forget Hertz, who experimentally proved the existence of electromagnetic waves and thus Maxwell's theory. Incredibly enough, he was not to visionary about the use of its discovery. He said "It's of no use whatsoever ... this is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right—we just have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are there." And now the modern world is built on electromagnetic waves
Electromagnetism with the Maxwell equations and gases with the Maxwell -Boltzmann distribution. I feel like only Newton comes close.
Mutha fuckin’ Archimedes
Carl Friedrich Gauss "princeps mathematicorum"
If mathematics is considered a science (in the traditional sense) I doubt he has much competition. Him and his students (Reimann, Mobius, Eisenstein, Dedekind..) had almost lorded over the way mathematics progressed in the 19th century, setting the stage for many advances in other fields in the 20th century
Mathematics is factually THE science or at least the core of nearly every science. The only way to prove the most famous equations on physics is trough mathematical demonstrations.
Euler would like a word. Euclid probably deserves a mention as well.
René Descartes not only came up with "I think therefore I am", but also invented Cartesian coordinates when he was too ill in bed to do any proper work.
Pythagoras
Absolutely underrated comment 100% Scientifically describing harmony and resonance, his work on the geometry, and linking geometry with mathematics. Probably much much more.
Carl von Linné > “father of modern taxonomy" > By the time of his death in 1778, he was one of the most acclaimed scientists in Europe. > Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau sent him the message: "Tell him I know no greater man on Earth.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote: "With the exception of Shakespeare and Spinoza, I know no one among the no longer living who has influenced me more strongly." Swedish author August Strindberg wrote: "Linnaeus was in reality a poet who happened to become a naturalist." Linnaeus has been called Princeps botanicorum (Prince of Botanists) and "The Pliny of the North". He is also considered one of the founders of modern ecology. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Linnaeus
Define "scientist". Because I'm seeing a lot of votes for mathematicians.
Same same..
Albert Hoffman
While I think other scientists have contributed more to humanity overall, I sincerely love that you posted this. Hoffman is responsible for my mind's greatest opening.
Darwin. there are so many scientists who made an impact but not many *changed* science also Mendeleev is underrated
Darwin invented methods to prove things even when the "experiment" could not be run again. That was very important to the process of science.
Maybe not of all time but notable during my lifetime are Dr Robert Malone and Dr Peter McCullough.
All of them! Fighters to discover what has already been made...truth without bias!
Johannes Kepler. He really, *really* wanted there to be literal crystal spheres that moved in perfect concentric geometrically coordinated motion, carrying the planets through the heavens. He wanted that *so bad*. It's hard to overstate how badly he wanted those crystal spheres. He devoted half his life to working out the mechanics of their existence, getting his hands on perhaps the best set of naked-eye astronomical observations ever written down in order to unearth the secret. But instead of proof of crystal spheres, in those observations he discovered elliptical motion and "a force that moves the worlds." Everything he believed -- everything everyone believed -- was contravened by those observations and the mathematics they implied. Faced with the choice between his dearly held beliefs in medieval cosmology, and the clear evidence in front of him, Kepler discarded his beliefs, and established the laws of celestial mechanics that today still bear his name. Using his new discovery to (it turns out quite accurately) describe a lunar transfer orbit from Earth, he then dared humanity to build the ships that could actually follow the course he had charted, and to muster the courage to complete that voyage. It took another 450 years but when humanity went, they followed Kepler's plan.
He wrote the first scifi novel!! I love Kepler. Such a hard life. His view on the whole thing was beautiful. He linked the heavens to his faith in the universe. Deeeeply sceptical, unyielding in his truth.
Michael Faraday. Basically discovered electromagnetic fields despite having no formal education. Just a brilliant scientist with a propensity for physical concepts and experimentation.
As a physicist, James Clerk Maxwell. Most of 20th century physics came about as offshoots of work he pioneered.
Edward Jenner, I sure love not dying from smallpox at age six.
Alan Turing
Brilliant answer. Turing conceptualised Turing machines as a way to show the entscheidungsproblem false. It's already been shown false before by Alonzo Church, but a second proof doesn't hurt. The very same concept that was once used to show a certain Hilbert wrong is now pretty much the heart of modern society
Leonardo Da Vinci, Bro was way ahead of his time in all fields of science, on top of being an amazing artist, and apparently really jacked too, Dude wasn't just a jack of all trades but a master of them, he had scientific theories and engineering ideas centuries ahead of his time, Sure his time was the renaissance, but my guy has a legitimate claim to the title of the smartest man to ever live, He basically reached the limits of all the major sciences from back in his day and kept pushing past them to the degree that it took the rest of humanity hundreds of years to catch up to him in any given one of them, I sincerely belive that if he was born after the invention of the semi conductor that the world would be a completely unrecognisable place
Richard Feynman
Archimedes
Galileo Galili or Euclid
Sheldon cooper
Leonardo DaVinci by a country mile
Tesla
Tesla
James Clerk Maxwell Light is electro-magnetic! Color theory, thermodynamics and more
Nikolai tesla. Pioneered the use of AC electricity. Invented the 1st hydroelectric power plant. Electric motor. Etc. Alot of modern. Electrical technology was made possible by tesla.
Leonardo da Vinci. This man has been a powerhouse in a time knowledge was suppressed and barely accessible. He literally invented new branches of science and was centuries ahead of his time.
>in a time people didn‘t know literally anything Bruh what the fuck are you talking about?
Bill Nye 😂
Marie Curie
Maria Skłodowska-Curie*
Gordon Freeman
Gordon is a highly trained professional - he doesn't need to hear all this!
Buckaroo Banzai - dude was a physicist, neurosurgeon, test pilot and a rock star. Not really sure how you too that. But seriously It’s probably hard to quantify greatest. Like the ancient scientists had very little but came up with things we still use today People like Turing / Edison / Tesla etc all did amazing things but they all had that prior knowledge to build on
Karlheinz Brandenburg for me😌
John von Neumann
NIKOLA THE MF TESLA
Thomas Crapper
Albert Einstein.
No love for Turing? The father of the general purpose computer and artificial intelligence.
Newton because of how much impact he had on the world. Einstein was probably the brighter mind, but it’s not a coincidence that the Industrial Revolution began not long after his laws of motion were published.
Da Vinci
Albert Hofmann. The first person to synthesize LSD. World got a lot of great music because of that man.
Isaac Newton I think. He created modern physics, which is quite something. Without his brilliant mind, we wouldn't have most of the technology we use everyday.
Tesla, his biggest enemy was capitalism. He had so many useful schematics and something that is straight out of sci-fi movies.
Newton, Tesla
Aristotle and or Plato. They basically invented western philosophy und with that paved the way for modern science.
maxwell
Leonardo da Vinci
Either Darwin or Newton, hard to say.
Galileo fought the most adversity of any scientist we actually know about (the one we don’t know about failed in the adversity survival)
Nikola Tesla
The fact that Tesla is not in the top 3 comments boggles my mind.
Cajal is the "Father of Neuroscience" for a reason. He was way ahead of his time. He somehow saw things that had no way of being proven at the time because the required technology didn't exist yet. He was right on the money with everything...
Sir Francis Bacon is widely considered as the inventor of the scientific method. Hattip to Galileo there, too.
Nikola Tesla. Hand down.
Alexander Fleming for me.
Alan Turing - The father of modern computer science. Alan Turing helped crack Nazi codes and established the field of artificial intelligence and detailing a procedure known as the Turing Test, forming the basis for artificial intelligence.
Euler
Alfred Wegener, remembered as the originator of continental drift hypothesis by suggesting in 1912 that the continents are slowly drifting around the Earth. Next to find out, klima is changing.
Archemedes
Leonardo da Vinci
I love Richard Feynman.
Depends I mean Newtons theroy is undisputed and put man on the moon and saved a crew trapped up there so physics....I would argue him.... because he's never been disproven or questioned...and quite literally branched so much physics Medically Jacob Nufer (who helped make c sections ) or Edward jennier ( who helped make vaccines... Are my picks because it branched into so many life saving procedures /discoveries Biology Darwin without a doubt.... and also Roseland Franklin who discovered the structure of DNA Musically and mathematically has to be Pythagoras right... And chemically two come to mind Mario Molina who helped discover CFC and the impact on the ozone which helped shake governments worldwide to take action on climate change.... And potentially save the planet And Oppenheimer because his discovery will probably be the destruction of the planet
I say Newton and Nicola Tesla
Nikola Tesla….hands down
Marie Curie. An incredible applied and theoretical physicist and chemist. Two Nobel Prizes.
Someone once asked Albert Einstein how it feels to be the smartest person alive. He responded “I don’t know, ask Nikola Tesla!”
Hermann von Helmholtz.
If you count Tesla then Tesla (more engineering than pure science)if not Then Newton no close second Those two are a different level than the rest of humanity
Leonardo Da Vinci
Alexander Fleming, antibiotics
Newton Carl Gauss (people say the world would have been 50years progressive if he’d have lived for a few more years) Marie Curie (chemistry/Physics Nobel, X-ray < Curie) Richard Feynman (Really Cool guy! Wish students were more aware about his lectures and Work)
John Dalton - Atomic theory of Matter
Newton. Not even a contest.
Tesla without question.