Most influential person in World History
- Thread starter craig9897
- Start date
Perfection
The Great Head.
You do a time adjusted historical influence score. You use a planetary sized supercomputer (Ideally something considerbly larger than Jupiter) to calculculate the quantum deviation of the Earth (with some factroing for extraterrastrial circumstance) in the instance of the smallest change of the universe that renders thier existance null. Then you weight it for how long ago they lived. After using a planetary computer for every human on earth ever to exist we find that Ernst Moro. Is the most influental person in history.gakkun said:
Hornblower
Cry Havoc!
I shall now look up your Pope Joan article and make sure that she is not a lizard.
Wikipedia is written by the general populace, such as you and me and anyone with a computer. I have helped write many definitions. And yes, this is far from official, in fact it is highly biased and inaccurate. facts are invented daily on there.
MattII
Prince
You have Mao and Cortez, but you don't have Bessemer or Marconi. and what of Edison, Faraday, Otto, Diesel, Bell, and the other very important inventors of the industrial period.
Aristotle, by a very significant margine; mind you, he very easilyl beats out both christ and muhammed as both of those religions used philophy based on Arsitotle in thier methods of explaining the world, never mind the huge impact he had on antiquity in the west directlly.
Homie
Anti-Lefty
HA!Xen said:
I very much doubt that Christ or Muhammed had access to any of Aristotle's writings.
Gelion
Retired Captain
I'm still the only one who voted for Gutenberg. Now thats 
MattII
Prince
While Gutenberg's invention of the printing press (and there is still controversy over this), for the modern world, I think a far more important invention was the Bessemer Converter, because without it, there would still be very little durable metal in circulation. (The Bessemer Converter was invented in 1856, dropping the price per ton of steel from £50-£60 to £7)
Xen said:
Saying that Aristotle is more influential than Jesus because, for a period, the Catholic Church used Aristotle's terminology to explain its doctrines is ridiculous. It's like saying Richard Dawkins is more influential than Darwin because more people today read Dawkins' books explaining Darwinism than they read Darwin himself. Besides, Aristotle was influential on Christianity only at a relatively late stage (the Church Fathers universally hated him), and then only in the west; and even then, Protestantism shook off most of his influence by the seventeenth century. Aristotle's influence on Orthodoxy was brief, primarily in the sixth and seventh centuries.
I agree that Aristotle is extremely influential - arguably the most influential scientist and philosopher of all time. But there are better justifications for that claim than medieval Islam or late medieval Catholicism.
onejayhawk
Afflicted with reason
Right. Julius Caesar was a myth as well. You can quibble about his history, but his existence is pretty much carved in stone.Plotinus said:
Back to the point, Buddha and Confucius seem obvious candidates, but you need someone that forced cultures to mix. Hence Genghis Khan.
J
Japanrocks12
tired of being a man
Mine is Max Planck. If he didn't use quantum numbers, then we would have no basis for completely understanding everything at the subatomic level.
Kraznaya
Princeps
Mohammed's teachings were Abrahamic primarily to convert the Jews and Christians of the region.
Fun debate, ultimately pointless, but fun nonetheless...
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned my choice, Galileo Galilei, the man who sparked what is arguably the most important movement in the whole of recorded history: The Scientific Revolution. Isaac Newton, along with many others, only furthered what Galileo began. The man completely overthrew the Aristotelian (sp?) tradition of the West, no small feat. He did so in spite of enormous opposition from the dominant (Western) cultural institution of the time, the Catholic Church.
While the teachings of Confucious or Mohammed have little direct impact on me (as the teachings of Jesus have little direct impact on non-Christians) the spirit of inquiry which Galileo began impacts nearly everyone, everywhere. Anyone who uses a computer (which I assume are most posters on this forum
) or has sat under an electronic light has felt the impact of the scientific revolution. The whole idea of Hypotheses - Experiment - Revise, which has become so commonplace in everyday human thought that we often don't even recognize that it's ocurring, was a radical break from Aristotle's idea of science (at least in physics), a break that Galileo was the first to forcefully push.
But that's just my two cents. For the record, I don't think the Scientific Revolution was necessarily a good thing, but influential, no doubt. Have at it!
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned my choice, Galileo Galilei, the man who sparked what is arguably the most important movement in the whole of recorded history: The Scientific Revolution. Isaac Newton, along with many others, only furthered what Galileo began. The man completely overthrew the Aristotelian (sp?) tradition of the West, no small feat. He did so in spite of enormous opposition from the dominant (Western) cultural institution of the time, the Catholic Church.
While the teachings of Confucious or Mohammed have little direct impact on me (as the teachings of Jesus have little direct impact on non-Christians) the spirit of inquiry which Galileo began impacts nearly everyone, everywhere. Anyone who uses a computer (which I assume are most posters on this forum
) or has sat under an electronic light has felt the impact of the scientific revolution. The whole idea of Hypotheses - Experiment - Revise, which has become so commonplace in everyday human thought that we often don't even recognize that it's ocurring, was a radical break from Aristotle's idea of science (at least in physics), a break that Galileo was the first to forcefully push.But that's just my two cents. For the record, I don't think the Scientific Revolution was necessarily a good thing, but influential, no doubt. Have at it!
Ah, but Galileo didn't bring about the scientific revolution single-handedly, did he? He was just one of a number of people. He did a lot of important work applying the scientific method to astronomy and physics, but he hardly invented the method in the first place. If it's the method that you think is so important, you should be praising Roger Bacon, or indeed Aristotle himself, not Galileo. See the discussion we're having in the thread on monotheism... Also, I don't see that he completely overthrew Aristotelianism. There were plenty of Aristotelians for a long time, and in some spheres, such as ethics, Aristotelianism has come back in a big way in more recent years. As far as science goes, it was really Descartes and (much more) Newton who exorcised the shade of the Stagyrite.
Besides which, of course, Galileo got a lot of things wrong. He thought he could prove heliocentrism definitively by his theory of the tides (he said the tides must be caused by the earth whirling about, making the seas slosh backwards and forwards), which was obviously wrong. More importantly, he believed that scientific theories are accounts of how things actually are, rather than models to predict phenomena. Strikingly, the church in Galileo's day held the latter position, which was exactly the same as most modern scientists.
Besides which, of course, Galileo got a lot of things wrong. He thought he could prove heliocentrism definitively by his theory of the tides (he said the tides must be caused by the earth whirling about, making the seas slosh backwards and forwards), which was obviously wrong. More importantly, he believed that scientific theories are accounts of how things actually are, rather than models to predict phenomena. Strikingly, the church in Galileo's day held the latter position, which was exactly the same as most modern scientists.
Naturally, Galileo didn't bring about the scientific revolution singlehandedly. He, as Newton would say later, "stood on the shoulders of giants." And while he may not have seen his equations as models of the world, it was certainly implicit. Galileo was the first (or perhaps the most influential) to bring mathematics to the forefront in the study of both earthly motion and heavenly motion. Bacon, though empiricist, was still Aristoltelian.
Furthermore, in his diaologues Galileo explicity states that his intention is to bring down Aristotelianism. "Salviati: 'Is it possible for you to doubt that if Aristotle should see the new discoveries in the sky he would change his opinions and correct his books and embrace the most sensible doctrines, casting away from himself those people so weak-minded as to be induced to to go on abjectly maintaining everything he had ever said?'" To cast aside a doctrine which had held so much sway for over 1500 years is no small intellectual feat. (Note I speak only of Aristotelian physics and astronomy).
As to Galileo being ultimately incorrect, well, so was Newton. And Einstein worked the last 30 years of his life trying to disprove quantam mechanics.
Furthermore, in his diaologues Galileo explicity states that his intention is to bring down Aristotelianism. "Salviati: 'Is it possible for you to doubt that if Aristotle should see the new discoveries in the sky he would change his opinions and correct his books and embrace the most sensible doctrines, casting away from himself those people so weak-minded as to be induced to to go on abjectly maintaining everything he had ever said?'" To cast aside a doctrine which had held so much sway for over 1500 years is no small intellectual feat. (Note I speak only of Aristotelian physics and astronomy).
As to Galileo being ultimately incorrect, well, so was Newton. And Einstein worked the last 30 years of his life trying to disprove quantam mechanics.
Yes, Galileo was outstanding and without him there might be no Newton or Einstein or Bohrs.
Perhaps this list should be broken down by specific science rather than overall, such as:
top 5 'most influential scientists'
1- Einstein
2- Galileo
3- Newton
4- Neils Bohr
5 -Planck
top 5 explorers:
1- Cortez
2- Columbus
3- DeSoto
4- Magellan
5- Pizarro
Top 5 politicians:
1- hitler
2- lenin
3- stalin'
4- marx
5- thomas Jefferson
Perhaps this list should be broken down by specific science rather than overall, such as:
top 5 'most influential scientists'
1- Einstein
2- Galileo
3- Newton
4- Neils Bohr
5 -Planck
top 5 explorers:
1- Cortez
2- Columbus
3- DeSoto
4- Magellan
5- Pizarro
Top 5 politicians:
1- hitler
2- lenin
3- stalin'
4- marx
5- thomas Jefferson
