Good point - however, if not Newton then Leibniz; if not Darwin then Wallace; if not Einstein then ----- it was the age of physics.
So, are there individuals who uniquely changed the path of history in a way that impacts us today?
I still stick with Bonacci because he combined Hindu/Arabic notation with decimal place value and then published his procedures. That is the underpinning of modern science.
I’m a day late to claim this as my own, so I’ll agree with you on this one. However, he did not invent tetraethyllead, he discovered its use as a gasoline additive, which makes him even more sinister when you realize that he poisoned himself intentionally to prove that TEL wasn’t toxic to humans.
One of the two guys I would nominate for Evil Scientist Poster Boy (the other being Harry Harlow who did psychological tests on monkeys which included the Pit of Despair [his term for it] and a rape machine [kidjanot]).
In the epic thread, we speculated that Gutenberg may have moved the ball by 50 years. There were rather fewer tinkerers back then, and the print shop required a number components to be brought together. Also remember that the industrial R&D department is a fairly recent innovation, provided to us by Edison.
Along these counterfactual lines, Aristotle might stand above all others as he was the first to apply a systematic treatment to knowledge. The approach seems obvious to us now, but it couldn’t have been back then as he apparently was the first. Compare him with the mysticism of Pythagoras. And AFAIK, there’s no comparable Aristotle in other isolated cultures. (All that said, my knowledge of the Ancients is pretty spotty and I would be happy to be corrected.) gamerunknown: No irony. The Koran is a great work of literature, whether or not it was dictated by the Creator.
The OP asks about who has had the biggest impact on modern society, so relatively recent geniuses don’t really have a fair chance of inclusion. If we were to fast forward for a few centuries I think we might see Dawin near the top if the list along with some of the pioneers of computer technology.
The invention of paper can be considered centuries ahead of its time due to simple evidence: despite seeing Chinese paper, China’s neighbors were unable to duplicate the recipe for many centuries. The reason Ts’ai Lun, inventor of paper, wasn’t one of the runaway favorites in the epic thread is that some assumed he might be semi-mythical.
Newton’s contributions seem game-changing by the fact that 70 years after he conceived his Laws of Motion, the contradictory theories of Descartes et al still had wide acceptance, at least until a famous 1736 expedition to measure the shape of the Earth. Biographies like this one are a good source for synopses of mathematicians. I was bemused to note a cryptic reference in that one:
This is why I’m sticking with Aristotle. The man actually taught us how to *think. *He’s the guy whose shoulders all the Gutenbergs and Newtons and Galileos were standing on. And most importantly: Go back and kill Aristotle, and it’s damn unlikely someone else would have duplicated his accomplishments within centuries, if ever.
One of the arguments I used in the game thread was uniqueness: I don’t know of any “Aristotles” in any other cultural tradition. You can find inventors, artists, leaders, etc… but as far as I know (and that’s likely not very far at all) there has been only one person who conceived of a rationalist-empirical approach to knowledge* in any tradition of civilization… and made it stick.
*No matter how flawed his application - c’mon, the guy was trying to figure this stuff out from a knowledge base of almost nothing. And it’s not Ari’s fault that he was as stultifyingly idealized to the degree he was thousands of years after his death. It’s like blaming Mohammed for 9/11.
But you also have to prove it would be different, that getting rid of one person won’t result in another taking their place. And, yes, that is doable, atleast to some extent.
Well, obviously this is all just silly internet arguing, no one can prove anything. And I hope you don’t take anything I’m saying as in any way dissing science or scientists. But, that said… once science and rational thought exist (and to the extent that Aristotle invented science and rational thought, he’s a great candidate for this), it’s almost guaranteed that eventually someone is going to come along who is smart enough, and has enough shoulders to stand on, that he or she will come up with (whatever invention or idea is in question). Whereas with pivotal military/political figures, that’s not at all the case. If nothing else, there’s the issue of time windows. If Newton hadn’t invented calculus when he did, or if Darwin hadn’t formulated the theory of Evolution when he did, there’s absolutely no reason someone else couldn’t have done the same thing 6 months, or 1 year, or 5 years, or 50 years later. Granted, the further you push things back the more different our world looks now, but the window for discovering those things never closes. Whereas, if Augustus doesn’t form the Roman Empire when he does, maybe someone comes along the next year and does it… but someone can’t come along 50 years later, or likely even 10 years later, and do the same thing, because political sea changes like that depend on a particular set of circumstances that only last for a short while, in a way that inventions and scientific breakthroughs don’t. (Granted, there are times and places where the intellectual atmosphere of the day makes it easier for intellectual advancement to occur… but it will ALWAYS be possible to invent calculus, eventually…)
I agree with a lot of what you say here, but although Aristotle was a great genius, he was not, in most respects, a radically original thinker. His main achievement was to evaluate, synthesize, and systematize the ideas that had developed from the approximately two and a half centuries of the Greek philosophical tradition that had preceded him. Systematizing it was no mean feat, he was working on a huge mess of contradictory, conflicting, and sometimes absurd claims, speculations and arguments, but he did not originate the “rationalist-empirical” (or, more basic I think, naturalistic and critical) approach to knowledge that characterizes both Greek philosophy and its heir and descendant, modern science. The originator of Greek philosophy, and thus the tradition of naturalistic (as opposed to supernaturalistic) and critical thinking that Aristotle passed on to future ages was Thales (or, arguably, his successor and first insightful critic, Anaximander).
That is why, upthread, I suggested Thales. Without Thales, no modern science. He really does seem to have instigated a radical change in human ways of thinking, and we can put a name and a fairly precise date on him (unlike Ugg who invented the first stone tool, or Zod who tamed fire, or Gorb who invented agriculture, or whoever).