…often revered as geniuses or thinkers well beyond their time.
could these folks and others of their illustrious kin stand up to the thinkers of today?
or rather, are you a considered a genius because you said it first or are you a genius because you said something that no-one else would ever think to say…forever?
that said, since when in the IMHO forum,
who would be your fav geek from the past?
I’d have to flip a coin between Beethoven and Darwin.
ok, fine not even close. Beethoven was true genius. Darwin just beat others to the press. but since thoroughly digesting the mechanism of natural selection at a young age, i can’t think of any other “concept” that has a more profound effect on my view of the world.
I go with da Vinci. Not only was he an artist, he is credited with imagining a number of practical applications for existing simple mechanisms.
And musically, I’d have to go with J.S. Bach. He gave us the tempered scale, after all, which is still in use today; and anybody who composes crab canons for fun would today be coding C++ directly into hexadecimal.
Ooohhhh! Da Vinci and Bach are good, but my choice has to be Aristotle.
That man gave us Logic, Science and the foundations of philosophy as well western civilization itself. All progress and science that we enjoy today, all, rings with the echos of Aristotle.
Eh…not quite. Wallace may have independently come up with the same general idea for natural selection, but it was clear in many of his writings that he did not fully grasp the logic of the argument, and the conclusions which follow. Darwin did. Wallace was also unwilling to allow for the effects of natural selection in our own evolution. Darwin did much more than simply beat Wallace to press.
I dont see why not, some of these people put tons of thought into whatever philosophic/scientific system they were developing based on at least something that has come before.
Aristotle is the last person to deserve any credit as a scientist. He didn’t give us science; he buried it in a hole so deep, it took a thousand years to dig it back up.
My personal all-time favorite thinker is Isaac Newton, a quintessential scientist, for a variety of reasons. Newton is often quoted as giving credit to the giant Galileo. Puh-lease, I say. Compared to Newton, Galileo was a rank amateur.
As for the question in the OP, I think Newton would have done something cool today, but nobody would have ever heard of him. Nowadays, you have to be a little personable to be a famous scientist.
Comparing scientists and philosophers like this is very hard. I like a lot of the nominees here. But just to add one, I’d say Stephen Hawking is certainly one of the greatest geniuses we’ve got right now.
I echo Nemo’s comment on Aristotle. The “science” that he gave the world wasn’t. It was natural philosophy. And it was so revered that for centuries no one dared challenge his conclusions with real science.
Yeah, Aristotle single handedly kept true science under wraps for centauries, if not a millennium. Not that he was such a bad guy. It was the lack of someone to ask him to prove it.
Einstein is a 20th century thinker who fits right in with that group – probably Stephen Hawking, too. True genius is all about thinking things that no one ever thought of before. If Einstein had thought the same things Aristotle did, we wouldn’t be recognizing him as a genius.
Einstein is a 20th century thinker who fits right in with that group – probably Stephen Hawking, too. True genius is all about thinking things that no one ever thought of before. If Einstein had thought the same things Aristotle did, we wouldn’t be recognizing him as a genius.
