John Snow
For finally convincing westerners that microbes exist. Which got the ball rolling on like, actual medicine.
That’s all.
He did, in fact, know something.
And it was quite important.
(almost like the fictional character was named that for a reason–)
And killing the last of the dragons and stuff
Louis Pasteur?
His milk is so passé. Louis Microfilter has much better stuff these days
But you need a subscription for it :p
I’m more a fan of Jonas Salk, Maurice Hilleman, Edward Jenner, Alexander Fleming
Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press.
I suspect that one is overrated, actually. He did one step in a long, gradual process. He gets credit mainly because it was big for Europe, who right at that moment in history invented proper seafaring and spread themselves and his name all over the place.
Considering Europe did conquer the world (yes, including China), I’d say that’s a pretty big deal…
I don’t think that was related to Gutenberg at all. Or, at the very least, they would have industrialised just a bit later without him. The initial wave was all about boats that allowed them to reach and enslave less advanced people.
But if you think the internet and social media as the continuation of that tradition - maybe that was a mistake after all. /s
Fritz Haber, the Veritasium video about him is fascinating (The Man who Killed Milioms and Saved Bilions). He developed the chemical process to efficiently synthesize ammonia, one of the key discoveries that allowed mass adoption of fertilizers and the incredibly rapid growth of the human population in the 20th century (you could say that thanks to him, bilions of people could live and be fed by modern agriculture).
Tragically, he also had a fundamental role in developing chemical weapons during WWI, although he belived their use would reduce the number of deaths as army would simply avoid gassed zones, so who knows if he really intended and believed in the milions of deaths he caused. Ironically, he also helped developing Zyklon B during the rise of nazism (while it was still used as a pesticide), but was quickly forced to flee from Germany because of jewish origin. Later, his last invention would be used to kill even more people.
There’s also a Sabaton song, “Father”, about him.
That’s where I first heard about him. Thanks, Spotify. I’ve learned more about European history from Sabaton and Iron Maiden than I have from school.
Someone else mention Borlaug in this thread, and it shows how no single person necessarily changed anything on their own, and how it’s difficult to put all the success as the result of a single person. Borlaug’s success was only possible by building on Haber’s work, just like Haber worked with Carl Bosch to accomplish what he did, and so on.
Seven Billion Humans: The World Fritz Haber Made
Haber therefore revolutionized the entire course of world history. The transformation of Asia and the emergence of China and India as giant, modern 21st-century global economies would never have been possible without Norman Borlaug’s miracle rice strains. But they could never have been grown had Haber not “extracted bread from air,” as his fellow Nobel laureate Max von Laue put it. Borlaug’s “miracle” strains of rice and grain require exceptionally vast inputs of the nitrate fertilizer that is still made from the process Fritz Haber discovered.
These fertilizers also require enormous inputs of oil. This means the dream of an oil-free world can never happen. Even if eternal, ever-renewable free energy could be harnessed from the sun or the cosmic currents of space, a world of seven billion people would still be desperately dependent on oil to make the nitrate fertilizer to grow the crops those people need to survive. The 21st century, like the 20th century, therefore, will still be Fritz Haber’s world.
Norman borlaug and Fritz Haber. The first was basically the father of modern agriculture helping feed over a billion people. The latter known as the man that saved billions and killed millions, helped develop the haber bosch process that produces ammonia used in fertillizers that are responsible for feeding half the world’s population. It was also used in explosives hence the “killed millions” part.
Is that the guy that discovered the gas used in the Holocaust?
Zyklon b was used as a fumigant before it was used in the holocaust. It was also called Prussic acid and would be known as Hydrogen Cyanide today. It was discovered by Carl Scheele back in the 1700s. It is also what gives poisonous (bitter) almonds their characteristic scent and toxicity.
Haber did however, suggest the use of Chlorine gas as a chemical weapon which his wife was so horrified by that she committed suicide. Haber was also partially responsible for the development of the Born Haber cycle which is a theoretical tool used to estimate the thermodynamic stability of salts.
Haber is only listed here because ultimately billions would have starved to death without the Haber process. And regardless of his intentions and the other things he did, that particular invention arguably saved more lives than anyone else that has ever lived.
Thank you for providing context. I did not mean to blame (or make people think that) Haber for any deaths, he was a smart person that made a great impact on all of us. It isn’t his fault people think of other ways to use his work for death. It most have been hard on him to have his wife commit suicide over it though. That’s rough.
Haber did not develop the Haber process to produce fertillizer. He did it precisely because German access to saltpeter from South America had been cut off and that threatened to severely compromise the German capacity for war. This was not a case where Haber’s work was meant for benign peaceful purposes and misappropriated for use in war. It was used exactly the way he intended it to be. It just happened to also be useful for keeping half the planet from starving to death. His wife did not kill herself because his work was misused. She killed herself because it was used exactly how Haber wanted it to be. And he can’t advocate for the use of Chlorine as a chemical weapon and have clean hands by definition.
Which is why I said that the only reason he was mentioned is because the Haber process ultimately saved the lives of billions of people arguably outweighing the harm that process was developed to enable. Haber wasn’t a good guy by any stretch of the imagination but without the Haber process, we would have had famine and death on a scale never seen in all of human history on this planet.
Interesting. Thanks for the explanation. I guess I got mixed up with the process name and his actual intended use.
Even the fertilizer thing is arguably bad. It’s allowed the population of the world to explode at an exponential rate and burn through resources even faster rather than be capped at a much more manageable level.
The alternative wasn’t a reasonable population, it was billions starving. The solution was, and still is, giving women better control over whether or not they have children.
Even more are going to starve when we run out of fossil fuels and can no longer sustain the agriculture required to feed the now massively inflated population. Not to mention all the other damage having so many more people is doing to the world that is also probably going to kill us even if we solve the resource problem.
Louis Pasteur
Politicians and kings rarely do something they weren’t forced to, and inventors are rarely without competition, so I take issue with most of the responses here.
Instead, I’ll go with naval officer Vasily Arkhipov, who, if he had decided to agree with the normal officers of the submarine he happened to be on, would have started a hot Cold War on 27 October, 1962.
Then again, there was a separate, slightly less severe close call the same day, so if you butterfly that who knows what else happens. It was a crazy time where few understood nuclear diplomacy and cold warfare, but nukes were ubiquitous, and were being treated like normal weapons. We got lucky.
There was another noteworthy case with Stanislav Petrov.
Yup. That one had a bit more wiggle room, though, because his superiors might have just come to the same conclusion he did. The other incident marked likely on the Wikipedia list is actually from France, which is almost funny to me. Can you imagine France doing a first strike out of nowhere?
Norman Borlaug. His agricultural innovations have saved literal billions of of lives from starvation and malnutrition.
I had never heard of him, thank you for showing me this
The Mitochondrial Eve.
Yeah my answer was “our Most Recent Common Ancestor”
Norman Borlaug helped develop a lot of techniques used by developing nations to gain food self-sufficency.
Not just developing countries but the whole planet.
Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman
I’ll have to argue that Santos Dumont and others inventors did Open Source in the XIX.
But compared to one of those. Who did the biggest impact?
I dont know them and maybe they made a much greater impact.
Dumont was a prolific Brazilian-French inventor. Among his most famous achievements are several lighter-than-air flights and flying machines (blimps), as well as a potential claim as the inventor of the first airplane.
Santos-Dumont was a pioneer of aviation, would say that that’s a big deal.
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Yes. That Stallman is arguably one of the top few people why we have the internet as it is, at all today.
Most other people could be “replaced”. If it wasn’t X, it would be Y. But only Stallman pushed the copyleft license onto Linux. Only Stallman’s organization popularized it.
So yes, that sexist, neurodivergent, bigoted Stallman, is one of the most positively influential people of our time.
A person needn’t be good in order to do good things, just as a good person doesn’t necessarily impact the world positively simply by existing.
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You’re wrongly assuming that the opinion of one man on a subject he has no sway in is relevant to more than IRC discussions.
Who ever started the whole enlightenment thing, with the idea that there is no god and we are responsible for our self.
Who ever started the whole enlightenment
Highly debatable, but one argument could be made for Sultan Mehmed II, which would be a fairly ironic person to give the award to.
Sultan Mehmed II
That’s the dude who fought Dracula? Didn’t know he was involved with enlightenment any sources to read up on it?
The argument is (though it’s certainly not a universally-agreed view) that the fall of Constantinople lead a lot of artists and scientists to flee from the city heading west, along with old texts. Which lead to an increased interest in their knowledge from the west, which is what triggered the Renaissance.
Mehmed II was the Sultan responsible for the invasion of the Eastern Roman Empire and the siege of Constantinople. Hence, he’s the guy responsible for it, under this model.
That is a funny perspective, I somehow like it.
It is a bit like fans of the EU thanking Gavrilo Princip.
You know, from what I’ve read about it, it wasn’t one specific person, and it seems highly likely there were others doing the same thing earlier, but they just couldn’t take root for whatever reason.
What do you mean? It’s always a specific person or a specific small group that comes up with ideas that are later popularized. Like you can pinpoint evolution theory to a small group of biologists with Darwin and Huxley at their forefront.
So as you might be aware, you’ve actually chosen an example with 2 simultaneous inventors. Alfred Russel Wallace came up with the same idea at the same time, actually sent Darwin a letter about it before anything was published, and was credited for it. To be fair, they had similar backgrounds, and like you say were a small group. However, there’s plenty of inventions of the same thing separated across lots of time and space. Writing was invented several times is fairly isolated civilisations, and Gaussian elimination bears a German man’s name, and was thought to be fairly new, but can be found in ancient Chinese works as well.
Who started the enlightenment? Voltaire is often on people’s lips, but if it wasn’t for the French revolution in his area just a few decades after his death, and which made him a sort of saint, he would have a much smaller profile. Meanwhile, if you go back further there’s someone advocating some enlightenment-ish idea recorded from probably every century. Famous names taper off towards the middle ages in Europe, but then so does the record in general, and Arabs like Avicenna or Al-Ma’ari pick up the slack.
But every time writing was invented it had to be invented by a specific dude or a small group of dudes. It did not just come to be out of thin air, someone had to invent it and someone had to popularize it. And so with enlightenment - someone (maybe we don’t even know her name) has to come up with an idea and others, whose names we know have to popularize it.
I get that you are saying that it might have been another person (or small group), sure - but in the end it has to be someone.
Okay, well, sure. Even if it’s inevitably someone, there is an individual or individuals that it turns out to be in the end. I think it would be a large group for the Enlightenment, even if you remove the forgotten advocates of it, but I guess that’s a nitpick. I’m a huge fan of it too, pretty much every other good thing has been a product of it.
On the subject of this way of viewing history, which came up in another place, yeah, it could be depressing, but it depends on how you look at it. Schopenhauer said we’re almost powerless and it’s awful, Nietzsche said we are and it’s great. They were often speaking in more cosmic terms, but I think it applies here. It’s also a lot less pressure, right? And, beyond that, I think it just fits the data really well.
I think it’s important to note that what I’m talking about is a bit like statistical mechanics in physics (small, unpredictable events adding up to a more predictable whole), and statistical mechanical systems are often complex or non-deterministic. I don’t think without heroes human society is actually much diminished; or are our moral responsibilities within it.
But without “heroes” who is doing the actual work? Like again: Darwin, Huxley and couple other dudes actually had to make observations, collect data, come up with an, at that time, absurd sounding idea and defend it against societal pressure. And you don’t think that they have influenced history and could be replaced by anyone else? I vehemently disagree that the data fits your perspective.
Sure, if Darwin had been hit by a horse-drawn bus, we’d still have evolution. And probably a YouTube short about “The sailor-naturalist who almost discovered evolution (but died)”. It would just be Wallace’s theory of natural selection. There you go, one data point.
I was going to bring up some less clear-cut examples, but I guess I should ask what your point is, because I feel like I’m missing something. I think Darwin was a cool guy, but I don’t think he was unexpected. Yeah, they did the work, but work is cheap, every peasant in history did work. Why should I care more about Darwin than the people who fed Darwin, and who were themselves (something like) inevitable?
Religion died the day they invented the scientific method.
Someone forgot to tell that to religions.
Ahh they are withering a slow and painfull death not our problem.
I would very much disagree. They are our problem and we should put them out of their misery.
True colours
I never hid my contempt for most organized religions as systems of oppression throughout human history. At the same time I respect peoples individual spirituality, as long as they don’t force it on others.
Any system of power is seen as oppression by those who dont beleive as long as people can choose their flavour of oppression we should be fine.
You said “we should put them out of their misery”
The enlightenment is overrated. History is driven by contestst of groups not contests of ideas.
And people are often governed or motivated by ideas.
People are governed/motivated by self-interest.
That statement sounds an awful lot like … an idea.
So you don’t have ideas in your head about the world that affect how you interact with the world? Might be true for you, but I would say it’s not an universal experience. Also I don’t say it’s juts ideas but ideas are part of our psychology.
As a counterpoint, may I submit: your own fucking username?
Be weird if they had made the first line of the Preface a counterpoint to the first line of Part 1
Which group contested your attention to this idea two months later?
Kaiser Chiefs
How is historical materialism a counterpoint to historical materialism?
Mathematicians, Physicists, Scientists, and Astronomers: Good effort everyone. The foundation of a rational world.
Very Notable Mentions:
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Chemist: Fritz Haber. 1/3 of world food production today can be attributed to his discovery. Also an enormous negative impact, see German Chemical Warfare.
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Biologist: Gregor Mendel. Monk who discovered the basis for genetics.
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Ecologist: Charles Darwin. Discovered the theory of evolution.
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Philosopher: Socrates. Critical Thinking.
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Computers: Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and Alan Turing. See empowerment of computation and relegating ridiculously complex math and data collection to machines.
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Computer Networking: J. C. R. Licklider, DARPA, and Tim Berners-Lee. See Internet and I/O on a global scale. Both positive and negative.
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Finally, the largest net positive of all: Artists. Yes, artists. Popularity as the prime determinant by nature of their work. For inspiration, desire, meaning, peace, community, and emotion. The language of all, an instinctive form of communication.
My visual pick is Leonardo da Vinci as both a practical and artistic contributor. As for classical, it’s nearly impossible to pick, but I’d say Beethoven and then Bach.
Eh, kind of ‘rediscovered’ more.
Biologist: Gregor Mendel. Monk who discovered the basis for genetics.
Sometimes children take after their grandparents instead, Or great-grandparents, bringing back the features of the dead. This is since parents carry elemental seeds inside – Many and various, mingled many ways – their bodies hide Seeds that are handed, parent to child, all down the family tree. Venus draws features from these out of her shifting lottery – Bringing back an ancestor’s look or voice or hair.
Indeed These characteristics are just as much the result of certain seed As are our faces, limbs and bodies. Females can arise From the paternal seed, just as the male offspring, likewise, Can be created from the mother’s flesh.
For to comprise A child requires a doubled seed – from father and from mother. And if the child resembles one more closely than the other, That parent gave the greater share – which you can plainly see Whichever gender – male or female – that the child may be."
- Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 4.1217-1232 (50 BCE)
Ecologist: Charles Darwin. Discovered the theory of evolution.
In the beginning, there were many freaks. Earth undertook Experiments - bizarrely put together, weird of look Hermaphrodites, partaking of both sexes, but neither; some Bereft of feet, or orphaned of their hands, and others dumb, Being devoid of mouth; and others yet, with no eyes, blind. Some had their limbs stuck to the body, tightly in a bind, And couldn’t do anything, or move, and so could not evade Harm, or forage for bare necessities. And the Earth made Other kinds of monsters too, but in vain, since with each, Nature frowned upon their growth; they were not able to reach The flowering of adulthood, nor find food on which to feed, Nor be joined in the act of Venus.
For all creatures need Many different things, we realize, to multiply And to forge out the links of generations: a supply Of food, first, and a means for the engendering seed to flow Throughout the body and out of the lax limbs; and also so The female and the male can mate, a means they can employ In order to impart and to receive their mutual joy.
Then, many kinds of creatures must have vanished with no trace Because they could not reproduce or hammer out their race. For any beast you look upon that drinks life-giving air, Has either wits, or bravery, or fleetness of foot to spare, Ensuring its survival from its genesis to now.
- Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 5.837-859
Certainly the more modern versions of these ideas had the benefit of the scientific method to help flesh them out and gain traction as opposed to being rejected and forgotten by dogma.
But let’s not be like the ancient Greeks in claiming Pythagoras invented ideas that we now know predated him by millennia. We owe a great deal to the giants on whose shoulders we stand on, but let us not forget the giants who tread the ground well before them and simply didn’t get taken up on the offer of their shoulders.
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
It appreciate the knowledge and poetry. Thank you.
let us not forget the giants who tread the ground well before them and simply didn’t get taken up on the offer of their shoulders.
Rather, let us not forget the people whose ideas reflected reality. Data and science are not speculation, “must haves”, or attributions of unknown mechanisms to the favor of deities.
Many people speculated on gravity, astronomy, and falling things long before someone put it into a mathematical formula. That is, quantitative and qualitative assertions outweigh ideological ones. I speculated with a sibling about black-holes being potential wormholes or portals several years before I read a news article saying Stephen Hawking speculated the same. Yet I provide no supporting evidence, written and dated or not, thus I am no giant.
Yet I provide no supporting evidence, written and dated or not, thus I am no giant.
Much of Einstein’s work we recognize as monumental were things that could not be proven in his time and were only validated decades later.
The Epicureans may not have had the scientific method available to them, but their focus on observation driven speculation was literally one of the factors that fed into its creation (see the Pulizer winning The Swerve).
Much of Einstein’s work […] only validated decades later.
You mean Einstein’s equations? The maths that were solid enough to develop advanced destructive mechanisms and form entirely new theories equations?
the Pulizer winning The Swerve
To be clear, the prize for… art, and not journalism.
I’m not arguing that philosophy had no role in shaping history positively. Shaped history, yes. Came up with bright ideas, yes. Proved the atoms were arrangements of the four elements, not so much. Hedonism being the point of life, also not so much. Gave evidence for their claims? Very little more than speculation.
They gave contributions, yes. My point is they are contributors, but not giants in science. Having not had the method available to join the scientific revolution is core to this assertion.
Proved the atoms were arrangements of the four elements, not so much.
Wasn’t the Epicurean position. Lucretius only surmises that there were likely a few handfuls of base forms of indivisible parts and then a multitude of their combinations. In fact, he rejects the elemental view.
And given we jumped the gun on naming ‘atoms’ after the word for indivisible, the closer philosophical parallel to modern concepts is quanta. And in that context, you even have Lucretius claiming that the behaviors of said indivisible parts must have a degree of indeterminate outcomes beyond following static physical laws for there to be free will (long before Bell’s work relating the behavior of quanta to superderminism). He also surmised that light was made up of indivisible parts that were extremely light and moving very, very fast around 2,000 years before Einstein proved the discrete nature of light.
They were right about everything from survival to the fittest, contribution of traits from each parent, the quantization of light, and the indeterminate behaviors of quanta literally thousands of years before these things are proven.
It wasn’t mere happenstance that they ended up being the most correct about the physical world of all the schools of philosophy in antiquity. They had a concrete methodology behind their success, and frankly it’s a methodology that modernity would do well to have learned more from.
I dont think evolution should be considered just a theory now, its basically proven.
Theory doesn’t mean what people think it means.
Culturally, we misunderstand theory to be equivalent to “hypothesis,” meaning “We have an idea, now we need to prove or disprove it.”
But accurately, theory means “We have a framework of interrelated ideas that fit the observable evidence.” In that sense, evolution is an EXTREMELY well supported theory.
Gravity is also a theory. So are general and special relativity. So is all of quantum physics.
I see, thanks for the nice explanation
You are wonderful. Well put.
In addition to what The Bard In Green said, while we know that evolution does happen, there is a lot of debate over what is its main driving force. Darwin argued that the main force was natural selection, and most biologists agree with him. But there are also other schools, such as Kimura’s neutral theory (evolution is caused primarily by luck) and Margulis’s symbiosis theory (evolution is caused primarily by mutualism).
Tim Berners-Lee is an excellent choice
Kinda settin the bar a little high here for Lemmy posts, ain’tcha?
We’re all here trying to make the place nicer. I think we’re all contributing what we can to make the place what we want it to be.
For me, I want a psychologically safe place where I can have fun, share my ideas, and learn something new. Especially learning interesting tidbits that can lead me down a rabbit hole of knowledge. So that’s what I’m doing. Here’s hoping a snagged a few people off to wonderland.
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Whoever first domesticated fire. Whatever his name was, I forgot.
That was Ug. Really cool guy. His golf swing was immaculate, too.
Every hole, a hole in one.
And then his grandson invented the number two.
I’d bet fire was involved in his/her name. Either fire was named after the inventor or the inventor was named after fire.
John Fire
I mean, that could actually be many people for all we know. Back that far it’s hard to even pin down the millennia something happened.
Fire domestication happened before our species even existed. Who ever did it, made us possible. Great answer.
-Sir Alexander Fleming (guy who discovered the anti-biotic properties of penicillin)
-Sir Isaac Newton or alternatively, Gottfried Leibniz (they both independently of one another invented Calculus roughly around the same time)
-Bill Watterson
Bill Watterson is up there
