Who is the Most influential Scientist in history?

[ironduck]

No one seems to have mentioned Kepler.

Kepler can be seen as the first modern scientist. Unlike many astronomers before him who jumped to conclusions, he relied exclusively on actual data that had been painstakingly collected by Tycho Brahe. To treat the data as the back bone of investigation rather than trying to fit results to an idea was very much a breakthrough in the history of science, which until that point had been much more arbitrary.

For all time greatest my personal favourite is Einstein.

 

[Verbose]

No one seems to have mentioned Kepler.

Kepler can be seen as the first modern scientist. Unlike many astronomers before him who jumped to conclusions, he relied exclusively on actual data that had been painstakingly collected by Tycho Brahe. To treat the data as the back bone of investigation rather than trying to fit results to an idea was very much a breakthrough in the history of science, which until that point had been much more arbitrary.

He was a stronger mathematician than Brahe, which helped.

Brahe could make neither heads nor tails of the epicycles of Mars. Kepler did the number crunching and found that the solar system was in fact not big enough to allow Mars to make the kinds of movements that Brahe had observed, if they were to be explained by epicyles. Which was a major starting point for Kepler coming up with his own model of the solar system.

 

[Naskra]

What Newton's physics introduced was an absolute concept of time, among other things. Prior to that, in both Aristotelian qualitative and Cartesian quantitative physics, time was relative.

Everyone before Newton conceived time as absolute. Sir Isaac was the first to draw attention to the fact that this was a postulate. When he writes "I
take time and space to be absoulute" he is not introducing a novelty, but underscoring something he suspected not to be provable.

Already Gallileo removed the distinction between sub- and supralunar distinctions.

I must have missed this in his works.

Brahe could make neither heads nor tails of the epicycles of Mars. Kepler did the number crunching and found that the solar system was in fact not big enough to allow Mars to make the kinds of movements that Brahe had observed, if they were to be explained by epicyles. Which was a major starting point for Kepler coming up with his own model of the solar system

This isn't fair to Tycho. Mars has the most eccentric orbit of the planets,
making it the most difficult to treat by the epicyclic method. This eccentricity
is the very quality that makes Kepler's insight most likely. It has nothing at all
to do with the size of solar sytem. Kepler's solar system didn't have a size.
The absence of observed parallax gave the system a minimum size; the heliocentric system increases this minimum and gives the all the orbits a relative size. but not a definite one.

 

[Naskra]

Kepler can be seen as the first modern scientist. Unlike many astronomers before him who jumped to conclusions, he relied exclusively on actual data that had been painstakingly collected by Tycho Brahe. To treat the data as the back bone of investigation rather than trying to fit results to an idea was very much a breakthrough in the history of science, which until that point had been much more arbitrary.

Kepler is one of the last I would attaint with modernity. He had a mystic streak big as the Milky Way.

The honor must surely go to Ptolemy. He could have given lessons to Heisenberg. He makes no claim to represent "reality" at all in his astronomical models and explicitly states he his only trying to give a mathematical order to
the observed data. Or to use his phrase: "save the appearances".

 

[Eli]

All the astronomy guys(Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus) are highly overrated. They have made great discoveries, but these discoveries have almost no influence on most people's lives.

Geocentric? Heliocentric? Who really cares? It's technology that makes our lives so great and Isaac Newton is the one who should be thanked for that.

 

[Verbose]

Everyone before Newton conceived time as absolute. Sir Isaac was the first to draw attention to the fact that this was a postulate. When he writes "I
take time and space to be absoulute" he is not introducing a novelty, but underscoring something he suspected not to be provable.

Not the Cartesians it seems, and for them it was a received idea form Aristotelian physics. Newton made time a constant one-directional uni-speed arrow. This was highly compromising for the omnipotence of God for both Aristotelians and rationalist Cartesians. And besides time was considered a phenomenon attached to creation by them (i.e. relative, in the primary relationship between man and his God). It couldn't exist prior to it for them, but Newtonian physics at least was intepreted as implying just such a previous existance. Some seem to have considered this as Newton turning Time into a God in its own. (He was wide open for all kinds of charges for the reintroduction of occult forces for the mechnistic an materialistic Cartesians anyway.)

But I'm hardly and expert on this stuff. I'm just summarising Alexandre Koyré's "From the closed world to the infinite universe" (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins, 1968), which isn't exactly a recent work, but this was Koyré's speciality and has kept quite well.

As for Gallileo removing the sub-/supralunar distinction, it's the underlying assumption for even looking for mountains on the moon. It doesn't make sense if you don't implicitly assume that it's a world similar to the one of earth, operating according to the same principles.

It's also the point of the cardinals refusing to look into his telescope. Whatever it is that looks like mountains, there's no necessity to infer that they are in fact mountains, provided the Aristotelian division in sun- and supralunar holds true. "Looking like" is no proof in the situation, and Gallileo didn't even try to prove the sameness of the earth and moon. He just assumed it, which won't win you an argument over which fundamental principles the world works by.

 

[Plotinus]

Nobody has mentioned Francis Bacon (later Lord St Alban). Bacon proposed using inductive reasoning, which separated science from natual philosophy.

Well, Roger Bacon had proposed that long before Francis Bacon. In fact, Francis Bacon's emphasis on empirical data was quite unbalanced - he allowed no conceptual space for the formation of theories to be tested by data; he just thought you could gather data and only then put your theory together. Which is ridiculous, of course, because if you don't have something like a theory to start with, how would you know which data to collect?

Everyone before Newton conceived time as absolute.

Leibniz certainly didn't. He thought both time and space were relative. This was the subject of his correspondence with Newton's disciple Clarke. Because Clarke was getting his answers direct from Newton, the correspondence was in effect a discussion between the two geniuses themselves - broken off because of Leibniz' death, but the general consensus is that Leibniz simply whupped Clarke. As usual.

Besides which, if everyone before this time thought time was absolute, how do you explain Augustine's Confessions?

Geocentric? Heliocentric? Who really cares? It's technology that makes our lives so great and Isaac Newton is the one who should be thanked for that.

That's not a very scientific attitude! Science is about the discovery of knowledge, not the manufacture of luxuries. I certainly care whether the earth goes round the sun or not, irrespective of any effect it may have on my life. Besides which, I don't see why Newton is so much more important for technology than any of the others mentioned.

It's also the point of the cardinals refusing to look into his telescope.

Actually, this is a myth.

 

[Verbose]

Actually, this is a myth.

Damn! All that scientific mythology cluttering up Gallileo, Bruno et al.!

You're right, but it still holds that what Gallileo saw in his telescope was not in itself a refutation of the assumptioms about the difference in principle between the sub- and superlunar spheres.

 

[Plotinus]

Yes, I agree. In fact, Galileo didn't have nearly as much "proof" for his theories as he thought he did, which is one of the reasons he got into trouble. Remember, Galileo wasn't condemned simply for saying the earth goes round the sun - it was for insisting that he could prove this claim scientifically and re-interpret the Bible accordingly, in the face of the philosophical and religious establishment. For example, Galileo thought that all other evidence aside, the motion of the tides proved that the earth went around the sun - because the tides were caused by the seas sort of sloshing about as a result of the earth's motion. Completely wrong, of course.

In Galileo's day, philosophical and religious orthodoxy held that no scientific account of the universe can be definitive, because only God can know things like that for certain. Thus, any scientific account of the universe is at best a model, not a definitive description. Galileo got into hot water because he disagreed with this and insisted that his own account was a definitive description, provable with irrefutable certainty, rather than simply a better model than the Ptolemaic one. Of course it's ironic that Galileo is popularly regarded today as a hero of science against superstition, when today most scientists would agree with the standard Renaissance understanding of scientific theories, not with Galileo's.

 

[Naskra]

Not the Cartesians it seems, and for them it was a received idea form Aristotelian physics. Newton made time a constant one-directional uni-speed arrow. This was highly compromising for the omnipotence of God for both Aristotelians and rationalist Cartesians.

If Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, and Newton proposed to meet next
Thursday at Kant's house at 8 o'clock sharp to play poker, none of them would have
had a theoretical impediment to being there. If one of them seemed to be late,
all would have agreed upon who it was, and by how much.
They may not have agreed on how this was possible or how real it was
and Augustine may have had to reboot his memory between hands, but
they nevertheless all set their watches to the same (absolute) time.
This is all I meant by saying they all conceived time as absolute. This is too
limited, you might say -- I wouldn't argue with you too hard about that.
Were the game scheduled for the Thursday before creation, the boys would
have different excuses for not attending, and Augustine may even have made the party
(he's already not yet still there), but I see that as a whole different can of worms.

 

[Plotinus]

That's not what "absolute time" means. All your description means is that time is the same for everyone.

The notion of "absolute time" is that time passes irrespective of what else is going on. For example, on this view, you could have a period in which nothing whatsoever happens - not even at the subatomic level - and time would still pass. On the view of time as non-absolute, by contrast, time simply is the succession of events. If nothing were to change, no time would pass.

It parallels the debate over whether space is absolute or not. If (like Newton) you believe in absolute space, you think of space as a sort of container in which things sit. On that view, you can have space with nothing in it (a vacuum). But if (like Descartes and Leibniz) you do not believe in absolute space, you think of space as simply the spatial relationships between objects. On that view, the notion of space with nothing in it is not simply impossible, it's incoherent.

Thus, the disagreement over whether time and space are absolute has nothing whatsoever to do with whether they vary. It's about their ontological status, whether they are substances or simply qualities of substances (or categories under which we perceive substances, if you want to go down the Kantian road).

 

[Naskra]

I really can't dispute you at all, Plotinus. We don't have enough common ground; I suffer from being too much of a hard-line empiricist. To me, the
debate over the nature or time goes on endlessly because none of the
participants have ever known what they meant by what they said. A long
barrage and counter-barrage of empty concepts. Call me a fool, if you like,
but I will not admit that "ontological status" is anything more than curious marks on paper.
My point about the philosophers above is that whatever they may have professed to believe or known about time, they had a working agreement
about the practicalities of it. It is not until the time of Einstein that this
consensus breaks down. "8 oclock Thursday? I'm not sure when that is."

 

[Naskra]

To treat the subject less sophomorically, let me put it this way:

I have the two philosophers, A and B. I now take away their watches.

A says "I have no watch, but time still passes."
B says "I have no watch, therefore time is suspended."

I, as an observer, cannot tell these two apart, other than that they
are making different sounds. Sounds which I can't interpret.

To be a (rather sloppy) logical positivist about it:

In the logical system of physics time and space are undefined terms which I can't even talk about within the system, I only have rules for the proper
use of the symbols "time" and "space". Now
I might devise another logical system in which these terms are defined,
call it "metaphysics", but I'm still trapped into speaking about them by using
another set of undefined terms.

I'm in this sorry state of understanding because it's the only one I can maintain with any logical rigor.

Getting back to Newton, I do maintain that he was shrewd enough to know
that his treatment of time as absolute, for the purposes his system, was
an assumption not warranted by the evidence. Useful, but not demonstrable.
And not crucial to its success either. Certainly no one jumped up and said:
"Your system is wrong, Isaac, because of its fallacious concept of time!"
He could have called it by some other name, but that would not have clarified things anymore than word "absolute".

 

[Verbose]

I guess Plotinus might get into the philosophical end of this. Personally I don't have either the knowledge of inclination for being really philosohical about this. I'm interested in the history.

Which here includes pointing out that when looking at pre-Gallilean or pre-Newtonian science (natural philosophy), one needs to take them seriously to understand what the conflict was about in the first place.

Both Aristotelianism and Cartesian rationalism are eminently logical, the problem being rather one of deciding upon the presuppositions. What people like Gallileo and Newton did was insert whopping big and radically new presuppositions about a lot of fundamental things because it allowed them to explain a bunch of things in an according to them more satisfactory manner.

So logic remained a constant, but the battle wasn't over the logical operations but about radically divergent presuppositions, with neither side offering much in the way of demonstration and proof.

Which is of course why Thomas Kuhn felt it necessary to introduce his concept of "paradigm" as a model for understanding what had happened, as traditional positivist, logic based history of science couldn't really make heads or tails of the situation. (And the epistemologist Koyré working things out in a somewhat similar fashion in Paris.)

 

[Verbose]

Getting back to Newton, I do maintain that he was shrewd enough to know
that his treatment of time as absolute, for the purposes his system, was
an assumption not warranted by the evidence. Useful, but not demonstrable.
And not crucial to its success either. Certainly no one jumped up and said:
"Your system is wrong, Isaac, because of its fallacious concept of time!"
He could have called it by some other name, but that would not have clarified things anymore than word "absolute".

No, that's EXACTLY what happened. It took half a century of arguing to get Newtonian physics generally accepted. (Voltaire taking it up as part of his general Anglophilia helped among other things.) And then another half century to do the math properly. (The Kant-Laplace cosmological model, with "the mathematical bulldozer" Laplace making the calculations.)

Newtonian physics was a hard sell to the Cartesians. Not only was Newton introducing a bunch of new presupposition, with little foundation outside the needs of his system, but they had a devil of a time with "gravity".
They'd spent 50 years removing divine and occult forces from physics in favour of purely materialistic and mechanistic models, and along comes this English country parson and reintroduces an occult force right back into it (bodies "attracting" each other over vast distances by some mysterious force). And the fact he did so using some devilishly complex mathematics meant further irritation.

 

[Plotinus]

[Naskra] Well, I'd just disagree with you there, as would most contemporary philosophers. I think most people can understand perfectly well what the difference is between the notion of time passing and the notion of time not passing, quite apart from a difference in words. Certainly it's a subject that contemporary metaphysicians seem able to discuss in horribly technical detail. But this is definitely going OT. I think Verbose has got the historical account pretty much right, particularly the controversy over the apparently occult nature of Newton's account of gravity. As Leibniz pointed out, saying that things attract each other because of their gravitational force is like the scholastic philosopher who said that sleeping pills work because of their dormitive virtue. It doesn't explain anything - it's just a different word for the same thing.

 

[Naskra]

Newton united terrestial and celestial mechanics. He did it in Book I of the
Principia. And he did it without once mentioning gravity. Moreover he substantially advanced both in the process. This is what bowled scientists
over at the time, and left so many gasping and spluttering. Kepler's Laws and
Galileo's ballistics were the same thing!!!
The whole side dialogue on the nature of gravity, action at a distance, ether, etc. was just that -- a side isssue. It's where the heat was and still is.
The light is in Book I. Newton begins by clearing up all the contemporary
confusions about moment, momentum, vis-viva, inertia and all other notions then circulating. He establishes a comprehensive science of static and dynamic mechanics in what is really just a few pages. He then goes on
to show how this science can be applied to the heavens. It was done with
a sure masterfulness that excited the awe and admiration af all who read it,
even in France.
Newtonian mechanics was immediately state-of-the-art. If an astronomer
had discovered a new comet in 1687 and wished to apply an orbit to it, he
would have applied Newton's tools, whatever school of philosophy he
may have subscibed to. And he could have done it without ever invoking
"gravity". Really. No kidding. No equations with "g" or anything resembling
it necessary. No occult forces need apply.

There is no complex mathematics in Book I of the Principia. It is accessible
to any schoolboy (and not in the Macauley sense) of the time. That's what
made it possible for Voltaire to write his little "Newton for Dummies" book.
Newton supplies the tools and the principles, but does little of the nitty-gritty
astronomical work. I don't think he even mentions a planet, other than the
Earth and Moon.

So I'll say it again: Newton united terrestial and celestial mechanics
It was a singular and stunning event in the history of science. It gives him
fair claim to the title "most influential scientist of all time".
Vortices be damned.

 

[Plotinus]

I would disagree with you there, to some extent, on two points. First, Newton wasn't the first to create a science that unified terrestrial and celestial mechanics. Descartes did exactly the same thing. Of course, Newton turned out to be more right than Descartes, but he was no originator as far as the conception of a unified physics goes.

Second, it's not true that Newton's physics immediately became state of the art as soon as he published the Principia. In fact, Cartesian mechanics remained the generally accepted model for quite some years - even in England - largely, I think, because the Principia was pretty tough going even for natural philosophers. It inevitably and utterly shouldered Cartesian physics out of the way, but it took some time to do so.

 

[Naskra]

At least we are down to a "some extent" disagreement.
My 1687 astronomer was hypothetical not by accident. A tacit admission on my part that
your objection has validity.
As far as "generally accepted model" goes, I'll leave that to the voters.

Personally I wouldn't say there was a such a model in the time between
The fall of the Ptolemaic/Scholastic system and the ascendancy of the
Newtonian.

Regards,
Naskra

 

[greekguy]

I'd say the greatest scientist of all-time would be a tossup between Newton and Einstein.