Quote:
Originally Posted by AstralTraveller
Of course everyone is going to say 'what about xxx' and I'm no different!  My first though was that there is little (nothing?) about spectroscopy, and you don't need me to tell you how important that discovery was. I would expect to see names like Bunsen, Kirchhoff and Fraunhofer on the list. |
Quote:
Originally Posted by Steffen
Continental Drift and Plate Tectonics is there, may be worthwhile tagging it with Alfred Wegener's name (after all, he was the one who got laughed at for his theory),
Cheers
Steffen.
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Thanks very much, David and Steffen, for your interesting input.
As far as Wegener is concerned, his inclusion or exclusion in the "Major Discoveries list" is the sort of question I faced all the time, for many of the discoveries:
- do you include the pioneer of the field who was far-sighted and ahead of the game, and who perhaps saw things intuitively that were far ahead of his or her time, but who had no real proof.
OR
- Do you include the person or persons who did all the hard work of actually proving that something is really occurring
I do take Steffen's point about Rutherford's importance in atomic theory, in this regard, as he did the hard yards of difficult experimental work.
My own preference, in compiling the list of dates and discoverers for this list of the top discoveries, was quite often to give a later year and/or author for a discovery, at the time when the discovery was put in the form that was eventually accepted, rather than to name the pioneer of the field.
(e.g. Galileo was a brilliant advocate for the heliocentric theory, and Copernicus rewrote Ptolemaic reasoning but with the Sun at the centre, but Kepler was the one who turned it into an elegant mathematical form that actually predicts the observables)
(e.g. Evolution was not discovered by Darwin, but by others......such as the now much villified Jean-Baptiste Lamarck)
(e.g. I gave the kudos for proving the atomic theory to Einstein and Perrin, instead of to John Dalton a hundred years earlier. The story of the 19th century fight over the atomic theory is interesting. Maybe Dalton
and Einstein should both be on the timeline for the atomic theory, but a timeline is supposed to give only one year for a discovery!)
(e.g. Hubble's original 1929 paper on the expansion of the universe, included remarkably poor observational evidence. So I gave the prize to Hubble and Humason in 1931.)
In the matter of continental drift and plate tectonics, Wegener's ideas , as we know, were often ridiculed, so he is easy to slot into the "brave hero who was before his time" category.
However, an awful lot of further geological discovery and measurement had to take place before his theory was finally proven in the 1960s. If you look at how the story panned out after Wegener, it was a very long and hard road for geology to actually measure and observe what is really going on in the Earth's crust and upper mantle. Indeed, the mantle is still not fully understood, to this very day!
There are many examples of people like Wegener who saw patterns that others did not see, using only very limited data, and who eventually turned out to be correct, but we tend to remember those of them whose conceptions were laboriously proved, later on.
David, your point about including the spectroscopists is well taken, and I will give it very serious consideration. Another angle on this is:
- how important or difficult was the work undertaken, in its time, and did it represent a major advance?
vs.
- how important it seems now.
I am somewhat familiar with the very remarkable story of Fraunhofer, so I am trying to assess his achievement in the light of these sorts of questions.
I do agree, The list
does need a few more advances in physics and chemistry to be put in. However, there are also a lot of discoveries in astronomy and biology that could compete for a place in this list!
To me it seems that the study of the history of science is very much a work in progress; indeed scientists are more concerned with the ever advancing frontier rather than with who discovered what; the great old stories we like to tell ourselves about the brilliant scientists of the past are often not questioned.