Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [121]
2. In the Florentine economic boom of the fourteenth century before a new way of [perspective] painting [that provided the ability to project and predict geometric space that] took Columbus to America
3. In the strange memory-world that existed before printing changed the meaning of “fact”
4. With sixteenth-century gunnery developments that triggered the birth of modern science
5. In the early eighteenth century when hot English summers brought the Industrial Revolution
6. At the battlefield surgery stations of the French revolutionary armies where people first became statistics
7. With the nineteenth-century discovery of dinosaur fossils that led to the theory of evolution
8. With the electrical experiments of the 1820s, which heralded the end of scientific certainty
Will and Ariel Durant succeeded in popularizing history through their monumental eleven-volume The Story of Civilization. In four decades of work the Durants compiled over ten thousand pages, covering the great ages of humanity from Oriental Heritage to The Age of Napoleon. After ten thousand pages covering ten thousand years, Durant was asked who he thought history’s ten greatest thinkers were. He answered:
1. Confucius
2. Plato
3. Aristotle
4. Thomas Aquinas
5. Copernicus
6. Francis Bacon
7. Newton
8. Voltaire
9. Kant
10. Darwin
The celebrated science fiction author and science popularizer extraordinaire Isaac Asimov offered his version of the ten most important scientists in history. Alphabetically sorted (to avoid the controversy and near impossibility of ranking, no doubt) they were:
1. Archimedes
2. Darwin
3. Einstein
4. Faraday
5. Galileo
6. Lavoisier
7. Maxwell
8. Newton
9. Pasteur
10. Rutherford
In 1990, when he was managing editor of the New York Times, Clifton Daniel organized a project entitled Chronicle of the 20th Century that condensed the history of the century into the ten most important news headlines from his paper. In chronological ranking they are:
1. Man’s First Flight in a Heavier-Than-Air Machine (December 17, 1903)
2. The Great Powers Go to War in Europe (August 1, 1914)
3. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia (November 7, 1917)
4. Lindbergh Flies the Atlantic Alone (May 21, 1927)
5. Hitler Becomes Chancellor of Germany (January 30, 1933)
6. Roosevelt Is Inaugurated as President (March 4, 1933)
7. Scientists Split the Atom, Releasing Incredible Power (January 28, 1939)
8. The Nightmare Again—War in Europe (September 1, 1939)
9. Surprise Japanese Bombing of Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941)
10. Men Land on Moon (July 20, 1969)
In the modern world we have a fascination with the great events of the past. It is stimulating to take a vista grande backward in time and pick out, from the billions of people, events, and chance occurrences, those that really made a difference. What we would not give in an instant of fleeting fancy to travel back to a day of critical circumstance and experience that moment with all its historical importance, as seen with twenty-twenty hindsight.
R&D magazine recognizes significant technological developments each year, and on their twentieth anniversary they let their readers select the top technological developments of all time. Each reader was given three votes—first, second, and third—out of nineteen advances they had previously voted as the most significant. Their ranking of the nineteen from top to bottom, including percentage of votes, was:
1. Harnessing electricity, 18.5%
2. Antibiotics, 13%
3. Computer, 10.7%
4. Vaccines, 9.9%
5. Internal combustion engine, 7.4%
6. Genetic engineering, 5.9%
7. Solid-state technology, 5.6%
8. Transistor, 4.1%
9. Quantum mechanics, 4%
10. Nuclear power, 3.6%
11. Special theory of relativity, 2.9%
12. Nuclear weapons, 2.6%
13. Superconductivity, 2.5%
14. Television, 2.3%
15. Telephone, 2.2%
16. Birth control pill 2.1%
17. Laser, 1.2%
18. Radio diode, 0.9%