I'm not so sure about #10
Physicist Alan Lightman has a new book out called “The Discoveries” about the most important scientific breakthroughs of the 20th Century. Here’s the list:
1. THE QUANTUM
Max Planck (1900)
2. HORMONES
William Bayliss and Ernest Starling (1902)
3. THE PARTICLE NATURE OF LIGHT
Albert Einstein (1905)
4. SPECIAL RELATIVITY
Albert Einstein (1905)
5. THE NUCLEUS OF THE ATOM
Ernest Rutherford (1911)
6. THE SIZE OF THE COSMOS
Henrietta Leavitt (1912)
7. THE ARRANGEMENT OF ATOMS IN SOLID MATTER
W. Friedrich, P. Knipping, and M. von Laue (1912)
8. THE QUANTUM ATOM
Niels Bohr (1913)
9. THE MEANS OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN NERVES
Otto Loewi (1921)
10. THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE
Werner Heisenberg (1927)
11. THE CHEMICAL BOND
Linus Pauling (1928)
12. THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE
Edwin Hubble (1929)
13. ANTIBIOTICS
Alexander Fleming (1929)
14. THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION OF ENERGY IN LIVING ORGANISMS
Hans Krebs and W. A. Johnson (1937)
15. NUCLEAR FISSION
Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann (1939); and Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch (1939)
16. THE MOVABILITY OF GENES
Barbara McClintock (1948)
17. THE STRUCTURE OF DNA
James D. Watson and Francis H. C. Crick (1953); and Rosalind E. Franklin and R. G. Gosling (1953)
18. THE STRUCTURE OF PROTEINS
Max F. Perutz, M. G. Rossmann, Ann F. Cullis, Hilary Muirhead, Georg Will, and A. C. T. North (1960)
19. RADIO WAVES FROM THE BIG BANG
Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson (1965); and Robert H. Dicke, P. James E. Peebles, Peter G. Roll, and David T. Wilkinson (1965)
20. A UNIFIED THEORY OF FORCES
Steven Weinberg (1967)
21. QUARKS
M. Breidenbach, J. I. Friedman, H. W. Kendall, E. D. Bloom, D. H. Coward, H. DeStaebler, J. Drees, L. W. Mo, and R. E. Taylor (1969)
22. THE CREATION OF ALTERED FORMS OF LIFE
David A. Jackson, Robert H. Symons, and Paul Berg (1972)
The link to the Boston Globe article doesn’t go into the details from the Sunday paper, but Lightman said that Einstein’s paper on special relativity and the Watson and Crick paper on DNA were the easiest to choose for the list.
7 comments:
All right, just admit it: you put this up just for the post title.
Did you know Werner Heisenberg once got pulled over for speeding? The trooper asked him, "Do you know how fast you were going?" And Heisenberg said, "No, but I know exactly where I am!"
Seen in James P. Hogan's guest bedroom: a plaque reading "HEISENBERG MAY HAVE SLEPT HERE."
--Toren
P.S. Great post title. I laughed.
Hmm - I would have put plant breeding and agrochemicals higher on the list. A safe plentiful food supply is more important than pondering the big bang. Likewise economic theories...
Two really big discoveries missing:
1) Radio--by Marconi
2) Solid state electronics--by
Jerry Martin
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can i get more information?
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