My vote is for Ghengis Khan.
Before Ghengis, there was absolutely nothing to indicate that “Western Civilization” was going to be any more dominant that that of the Islamic Middle East or China.
Ghengis, and his immediate successors using his methods, did terrible damage to both these contenders, while leaving the West mostly intact.
I’d go with either Newton or Paul. Like Bryan said, Newton connected the heavens with earth and thus demystified our attempts to understand nature. The whole notion of a clockwork universe governed by universal secular laws begins with him.
Of course, I don’t think Newton was indispensable. Someone was bound to combine Copernicus’ heliocentric system with Kepler’s data and derive an inverse-square orbital force. And someone would have eventually connected that orbital force with the gravity we see on Earth. But it wouldn’t surprise me if those insights had been delayed by centuries (I’d posit an alternate-Earth 19th-century long-range artillery officer making the connection).
But Paul is hugely influential as well. He turned small tribal doomsday cult into a cosmopolitan religion. Without him, Christianity would have died out just like all the other cults of the time. The Roman religions probably would have been replaced by something during the same time frame, but it could have been anything.
There were multiple people toying with the same idea at the time (I actually think Newton got the idea from Hooke originally). None had the mathematical skills to prove the orbits were due to such a force, but I think that the idea would’ve bumped into a sufficiently talented mathematician within the same generation had Newton not been around, and someone else would’ve proved the same result.
I agree. But I think connecting the orbital force with terrestrial gravity would have been less likely. I think most of the work Newton did would have been done by someone else with a generation or so, but making the overarching connections between everything–that is something that requires a special sort of genius working in the right areas. That could take many generations to get.
Ah, sorry, I misunderstood your post.
I still don’t know that it would’ve taken that long to figure out that terrestrial and celestial gravity were the same force. I would think that once the inverse square law was understood, it would occur to someone fairly quickly to calculate what the magnitude of that force would be for objects near the Earth’s surface, and thus realize that it was the same strength as that of terrestrial gravity. After all, people had already posited that the basic laws of motion held for planetary bodies, it doesn’t seem such a leap to think that perhaps the same actual forces hold “up there” as “down here” as well.
But of course these steps always seem easy in retrospect. Perhaps your right and it would’ve been a bigger leap then it seems. That’s sort of the problem with these types of questions, there isn’t really anyway to know how much of human ideas or events are particular to the people involved, and how much are inevitable once a certain body of knowledge and technical skill are amassed by the culture in general.
Same here. I had pretty much the same view of Thermopylae as you did until very recently. It’s interesting how history can be skewed in the interest of making a good story even better. I suppose 300 Greeks standing up to tyrannny and dying for freedom sounds a whole lot better than 4,200 Greeks screwing up and being forced to retreat.
Marc
There’s serious contention to whether Solon or Cleisthenes had the most influence of the city of Athens (I favor Cleisthenes myself). I don’t see how we can really point to any one individual and say that he or she (I said that with a straight face) is the most important person in western civilization. It’s a fun little mental exercise though.
Marc
Leibniz, anyone? At least for the calculus.
The trouble with listing influential inventors and scientists is that there often seems to be somebody working on the same invention or theory who got scooped by the guys who get the credit. See Darwin and Wallace, Newton and Leibniz, the half-dozen guys who each invented the radio, and so on.
When it’s railroad time, somebody’s gonna invent the railroad. If it’s not railroad time, it doesn’t matter how brilliant an engineer you are you’re not going to build a railroad.
One nameless inventor who should get some credit: the guy who invented the stirrup. It’s hard to believe that during classical times there was no such thing. The stirrup was an huge force multiplier that magnified the power of cavalry, from the Mongol hordes to the western knights. And powerful cavalry is bad for civilization…they’re either raiders and destroyers like the Mongols, or they’re landed aristocracy who keep the peasants down. So the guy who invented the stirrup is one of history’s greatest monsters.
A long those lines the nameless Chinese Guy who invented gunpowder. It shaped a lot of the Western World after it got there how ever man centuries later. And considering that alchemists in other societies didn’t seem to have duplicated it’s discovery, I don’t think you can make an “it’s discovery was inevitable about then by some other somebody” argument quite as strongly.
Whether or not he existed this is the correct answer. After a certain point the historical legacy of a person outweighs any reality of their existance anyhow. Jesus Christ the memory is every bit as real as Alexander the Great the memory.
Arguments could be made for Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, Constantine, Plato, Abraham, Moses, and Akhenaten too.
Kepler’s data lets one derive an inverse-square law, but not the gravitational constant (independent of the solar mass). Until an independent measure of the solar mass could be made, the orbital force couldn’t be used to make magnitude predictions on earth. And there’s no practical reason someone would try to use orbital mechanics for earth-bound objects (which is why I suggested an artillery officer eventually making the connection). So I think Newton connecting them was rather unlikely.
And why Newton was a step above other inventors and scientists; he was way ahead of his time. It’s not obvious nature works the same on earth as in the heavens and the fact it does doesn’t have any practical uses. But the concept that “the laws of nature are universal” is important philosophically. Newton single-handedly moved us a couple centuries forward on the Enlightenment path.
Edit: make it English more good.
I think the “Jesus” answers are on the right track, but don’t go far enough. The most influential person in the history of Western Civilization is the person who first conceived of and spread the notion of the monotheistic Israelite God – e.g. the founder of western monotheism.
This is an atheistic view. For theists, I would suppose, the notion of Abrahamic monotheism was inevitably going to take hold one way or another, so “Jesus” would probably be the correct answer.
Except there’s the same intermediate step of the Earth’s moon. Once they had the inverse square law for the planets, they’d certainly apply the same result to the Earth’s (and Jupiter’s) moons, since they’re orbiting objects in the same way. Then they have the Gravitational constant times Earth’s mass, and all that needs to be done is to stick in the Earth’s radius for the distance and see that it is the same strength as terrestrial gravity.
I guess it’s not certain anyone would do this last step, but I have trouble believing that none of the many impressive scientists living in Newton’s time wouldn’t at least ask where the celestial gravity ends, or what its effects would be if it could still affect some types of matter (meteroids?) that were on the Earth’s surface. Does it influence the clouds, or the wind, or would it be possible for the Earth to have a moon closer to it then the actual one? All these questions would lead someone to start playing around with the Law of Gravitation at distances closer to the radius of the Earth, and from there the lucky (probably German) scientist has his claim to fame.
I guess it depends on whether you believe Abraham was a real person or not. Perhaps you could credit Akhenaten.
I said it because I screwed up and confused Peter and Paul. :smack:
Except I don’t think any such person ever existed. There wasn’t a guy like Abraham who lived in a polytheistic society and one day had an epiphany and decided monotheism was where it’s at. The monotheism of the ancient Israelites evolved slowly. First they were animists. Then they were polytheists. Then they were polytheists with a chief god. Then they were henotheists who only worshiped one god as the special protector of their tribe, but didn’t deny that other gods existed. Then they were henotheists who worshipped one god and declared that the other gods were much less powerful than their god, and were evil besides. Then they finally decided that the other gods didn’t exist, only their god did.
Ok, I was basically assuming that somewhere in all that there was a primary mover & shaker who, if the historical record were complete, we would be able to point to as the man most directly responsible for the shift to western-style monotheism. I don’t know a whole lot about it, though, so I’m willing to be wrong.
My vote is for Ogadai Khan for dying when he did and sparing Europe the ravages of the golden horde. Russia was laid to waste and greatly changed it’s cultural psyche almost certainly for the worse, ditto the middle and near east.
I think a pretty strong case can be made for Galileo. He challenged the Church’s blind reliance on Aristotle’s untested (but not untestable) pronouncements about the natural world, and did simple and elegant experiments to prove, for instance, that heavier things do not fall faster than lighter things. And so much more.
Significantly, he wrote about these things (in Italian, not Latin) in books intended for ordinary people, not only scholars. Most of them are dialogs between three characters (Simplicio, Salviati, and Sagredo, representing a naive person, the church, and himself, respectively), and include humor and drama along with enlightenment. (Galileo invented edutainment!) They were, and remain to this day, eminently readable and interesting.
He’s a remarkable example of a devoutly religious man who also firmly believed that the universe was understandable and that God gave humans the power of reason so that we could explore and understand it. For this, of course, the church threatened him with torture and imprisoned him for the last years of his life.
There are any number of great biographies of Galileo, but I can recommend Dava Sobel’s Galileo’s Daughter without reservation. I also strongly recommend reading Galileo himself. Dialog Concerning the Two Chief World Systems is the one that got him into trouble. It’s longer than Two New Sciences, but a little more interesting overall.