How come it has been so long (decades-plus) since we had a scientist of life-changing significance?

off base wrote:

Cecil Paine

James Watson

Philo Farnsworth

Gregory Pincus

Tim Berners-Lee

Lise Meitner / Otto Frisch

Good list. Based on my family history I might add Michael Brown and Joseph Goldstein.

So Crick was a "game changing" scientist, but Frank was not?

It takes some time to know what is going to be "life-changing." For example, CRISPR could be bigly yuge, but it's not really on the average guy's radar. Depending on what we're able to do with it, my grandkids could be looking back a hundred years from now as a revolutionary discovery.

Also, I think some big innovations get ignored just because we're innovating so quickly. In just the past few decades, HIV has gone from a uniformly fatal disease to a disease that people die with rather than dying from. That's life-changing.

This Man wrote:

Citizen Runner wrote:

Because of the complexity of many recent breakthroughs science is probably more evolutionary than revolutionary and more team oriented than during the enlightenment. Thus scientists tend to be anonymous outside of their expert group.

For example, recent advances in gene editing are a pretty big deal, but I couldn't name names of those who have made it reality.

This ^

Once again demonstrating that Citizen Runner is among the best posters on LRC.

Agreed with this too. I would add that it is important to remember the context of the enlightenment. This was the early days of the scientific method, so many "easy" discoveries were still there to be made. That doesn't mean they were easy or obvious, just that today's advances are much more nuanced.

An example is the new potential massless propulsion system. It appears to break the laws of classical physics, yet has been proven to work. I would say that is pretty groundbreaking in a modern sense.

Machine learning is another breakthrough. It is such a breakthrough that nobody actually fully understands it. That could prove to be a massive game changer in how we use and produce technology over the next decade or two. It could easily be as profound of a technology as the original ICs or computers.

When the DNA people finally get their hands on the intelligence dial and are able to turn IQs up to 300 at will, then THAT will be a major game changer.

The only problem is that whoever manages to do it will be considered by future generations of super-geniuses to be a low grade moran.

idiotIf scientists from today faced off against scientists from the past, indeed the latter group would go home DEVASTATEDmoranBy my online science calculator, the following scientists would be confirmed for all-time great status.Thorne, Drever, Weiss - LIGO and experimental measurements of black hole mergers, further confirmation of general relativityLHC and the Higgs boson - Peter Higgs and all of the other ppl who predicted itCharpentier and Doudna - CRISPRMaldacena, Susskind, Preskill, van Raamsdonk, et al. - holographic principle, the black hole information paradox, ER = EPRHinton, LeCun, Bengio - machine learning, neural networks, vision, automated language translationDeisseroth and Boyden - optogenetics, clarityJim Ryun - WR if he ran on synthetic track

Robert Edwards received a Nobel Prize in 2010 for work regarding In Vitro Fertilization that he did a few decades ago. As someone who is a recent beneficiary of his work, I'd say that's pretty groundbreaking.

Regarding Einstein - something that iconoclastic coming around nowadays would probably be thoroughly stifled by the current peer review system.

What also needs to be asked is how many of these scientists were widely heralded while they were still alive?

As someone else pointed out above, life changing breakthroughs may not be evident for some time after the scientist's death.

It's a lot more difficult to discover things of life changing significance that haven't already been found or made.

SAlly V wrote:

Marie Curie

HAHAHAHAHA!

You mean the wife of the Pierre Curie? The genius who unselfishly gave some of his ground breaking results to his wife?

SAlly V wrote:

What has happened to science where nothing groundbreaking is occurring today?

Something tells me that you don't have the slightest clue about the work that is being done in the various scientific fields today, much less its historical significance.

Derp Nation wrote:

SAlly V wrote:

What has happened to science where nothing groundbreaking is occurring today?

Something tells me that you don't have the slightest clue about the work that is being done in the various scientific fields today, much less its historical significance.

Significance is obscured in the moment. True contributions can only be discerned decades later, when the politics are muted and the playing field leveled.

DiscoGary wrote:

anti moran wrote:

moran

jobs and gates are mediocre, at best, engineers

they were salesmen and businessmen

gates stole DOS and rebranded it MS-DOS and did a heck of a sales and marketing job with a crap product, which he neither developed or maintained, much less enhanced

Nope. Gates was a world class engineer and a world class businessman. Gates bought DOS, he didn't steal it.

Jobs was a world class "systems" engineer, in that he knew what the whole product need to look like.

Respect must be given where respect is due.

You are absolutely an imbecile.

Gates and Jobs are good businessmen and salesmen. There is no need to to call them "inventors/engineers" in order to accord them their due respect. Indeed, doing so is a sign of disrespect in that it suggests a need for them to be what they are not in order to be worthy of respect (see "social scientist", "political scientist . . .).

everything's been discovered wrote:

And Edison wasn't really a scientist, he mostly used trial and error.

And theft. He was really good at stealing other people's inventions.

Gold star poster wrote:

Neil Tyson DeGrasse

He's legit, no disrespect, but he hasn't done anything remarkable as a scientist. He's more of a spokesscientist.

You guys have no idea how cool it is to see Norman Borlaug getting some love here, he is who I thought of right away.

I ran CC with his grandson in middle school. I had no idea who he was at the time. Norman may have watched me run, not sure though.

One reason there may not be the "all-stars," is that now things are more collaborative, you've got the internet and jets.

The Large Hedron Collider, International Space Station, Silicon Valley, the teams working on nuclear fusion.....these are all massive milestones. If a great scientist wants to make an impact, they join a team, which may not have been the case in the past.

Joseph MF Pedlosky

That poster walked right into it - quite sad. Hawking's work pales in contrast to prior generations, and he often wanders off into non-scientific/pseudoscientific realms of discussion, where he can range anywhere from outlandish to uninformed.

Walter Rudin Principles wrote:

That poster walked right into it - quite sad. Hawking's work pales in contrast to prior generations, and he often wanders off into non-scientific/pseudoscientific realms of discussion, where he can range anywhere from outlandish to uninformed.

Didn't Newton spend most of his career working on interpreting the bible and alchemy? I'm not sure throwing out a scientist's achievements because of weird things they did later in life is a valid argument in this context.