My impression on reading Sagan is that he liked to consider himself a great scientist, something that Asimov never did.
The villain of the excellent movie “Real Genius” seems to be based on Sagan, with a popular TV science program called “Everything.” His popularization work was important, but he still seemed to be a butthead astronomer.
Thermionic emission was first discovered by Frederick Guthrie in 1873. It was apparently independently (re)discovered by Edison in 1883, which is when it became well-known. The diode was invented by John Ambrose Fleming in 1904. It was used as a detector for radio signals in place of crystal detectors, but could not amplify signals. Finally, the triode was invented by De Forest in 1907. He probably gets credit because Fleming’s had such limited use, and Edison and Guthrie never made any use at all of their things, so most people are unaware of the previous history.
Going back a bit, I nominate Democritus. Almost all introductory chemistry textbooks cite his atomic theory of matter. But he wasn’t really a scientist and he didn’t reach his conclusion through rigorous evidence and rational analysis. It was basically a lucky guess. That’s very different from the way that the real founders of modern atomic theory (Dalton, Lavoisier, Avogadro, etc.) reached their conclusions about 2200 years later.
Einstein is responsible for the correct quantum explanation of the photoelectric effect and co-discovered and Bose-Einstein statistics that correctly describe the quantum behavior of bosons. He wasn’t opposed to quantum theory, per se, but to the non-deterministic interpretation of quantum theory held by Bohr et al. Einstein thought there must be some hidden variable that if we knew to measure it, would make quantum theory deterministic. All the evidence suggests that Bohr was right and Einstein wrong on this count.
Here’s a video lecture on Edison which makes the case that he’s honored for the wrong reasons, and that his true genius was being able and willing to follow through on his ideas all the way to the industrial scale. That is, his genius wasn’t so much in inventing the light bulb, but in inventing the electrical system practical electric lighting requires, and getting that off the ground despite the immense time and trouble required:
Sagan may not have been a Great Scientist, but he did do some respectable work studying Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. He worked with NASA from the 1950s through the 1970s, and contributed to many of the space probes.
He was one of the scientists who developed the idea that Venus is not a tropical paradise, but a desolate hellhole. (I’m oversimplifying, but you get the idea.)
Not an alternative explanation, but an explanation.
The so-called ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’ of quantum physics is not an explanatory one. It is more an exercise of self-censorship. Einstein sought to get past the almost ad hoc nature of by which the tenets of quantum physics had been established and find out ‘the why’. The accurate predictions of quantum physics weren’t enough for him. A complete theory would offer explanation too.
Given Einstein’s high reputation it may seem peculiar to call him under-rated! But I think it’s correct. This article agrees with me and thinks *Einstein should have been awarded seven Nobel Prizes! *
According to that article, here are some of Einstein’s contributions to quantum theory:
Roll over Archimedes, Leonardo, Mozart. Einstein was the world’s greatest genius ever.
BTW, UIAM there are several different models of QM — Everett’s, Cramer’s, Barbour’s? — in which “God does NOT play dice.” I wouldn’t rush to bet against Einstein on this issue.
Some of the nominations in this thread are hilarious. Two, in particular, that stand out are:
Stephen Hawking. Are you kidding? His earliest papers, dating back to 1966 (long before his fame), are cited hundreds of times. I cannot imagine anybody in the scientific community considering him overrated.
Carl Sagan. While not as heavily cited as Hawking had an eminent career as in astrophysics. Many of his papers earliest papers are cited 30-80 times (a very respectable number), and quite a few are cited hundreds of times. Again, this is long before his fame. His work was unquestionably considered to be of good quality by the scientific community.
So? How many physicist have papers with hundreds of citations that are unknown? If you ranked every physicist ever, what place would you assign him? What place would the general public assign him?
I’d guess the latter would be top 5 if not top 3. If he’s not actually top 5, then, yeah, he’s overrated.
Publishing a single paper with hundreds of citations is a significant accomplishment. Having dozens of papers all with hundreds (or thousands in some cases) is the mark of a truly exceptional scientist. And again, these are papers that predate his fame to the general public. The scientific community assessed Hawking’s from an early time and found it to be exceptional. Where exactly he is ranked is irrelevant. He’s a top scientist who is considered by both professionals and the public to be a top scientist.
Anyway, gonna go with Galileo for the OP’s question. Everything he did scientifically was extremely valuable, but it is the veneration held Galileo by Protestants who want to stick it to the church which has caused this over-rating of Galileo’s influence. In the end, Galileo recanted and spent the rest of his life in a sinecured “house arrest”.
Jim Watson, with Crick, discovered the structure of the most important molecule in the universe, making the scientific breakthrough of the twentieth century, from the vantage point of his couch. Never did an experiment himself. That ain’t overrated - that is a truly exceptional (and ruthless) grasp of the problem at hand, how to solve it, and why it’s important.
There’s no question that Mendel’s Laws are extremely important, and essential to understanding genetics and evolution. To contrive a simplistic nonfactual example, if all but one human is 5’ tall and a single mutant is 6’ tall, Darwin assumed that the mutant’s children would be 5’6"; his grandchildren 5’3" and his great-grandchildren (with no inbreeding) 5’1½". The tallness mutation has almost disappeared after just three generations! When this problem was explained to Darwin he began editing his books, even accepting that Lamarck might have been partially right after all!
Mendel solved this problem. Half the mutant’s children would be 6’ tall; and the full 6’ tallness trait would pass even to his great-grandchildren (though only ⅛ of them). But even after Mendel published his paper, Darwin continued to edit his books despondently because he wasn’t aware of Mendel’s work. Mendel’s Laws were hugely important but for 35 years they remained almost secret!
When the Laws were finally re-discovered it was by other experimentalists (who then searched the literature and found that their results were not new). Had Mendel’s ideas caught the eye of Darwin or one of his colleagues in 1865 it would have led to huge progress toward the understanding of genetics and evolution. But they didn’t.
Other than influence, a scientist can be considered great because of his talent. Mendel did do excellent work, but it has also been argued that he was lucky in his choice of species and traits.
