He opened the human mind to pursuing natural science unimpaired by supernatural prejudices. Evolution by natural selection: Charles Darwin, 1859ĭarwin showed that the intricate complexity of life and the intricate relationships among life-forms could emerge and survive from natural processes, with no need for a designer or an ark. Seriously, it’s hard to believe it’s only Number 3.Ģ. Quantum theory ripped the entire fabric of classical physics to shreds, demolished ordinary notions of the nature of reality, screwed up entire philosophies of cause and effect and revealed peculiarities about nature that nobody, no matter how imaginative, could ever have imagined. Quantum theory: Max Planck, Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Born, Paul Dirac, 1900–1926 And provided science fiction writers with black holes.ģ. And opened scientists’ eyes to the whole history of the expanding universe. General relativity was much more revolutionary than special relativity, because it ditched Newton’s law of gravity in favor of curved spacetime. It merged space with time, matter with energy, made atomic bombs possible and lets you age slower during spaceflight. In some ways special relativity was not so revolutionary, because it preserved a lot of classical physics. Special relativity: Albert Einstein, 1905 Modern extensions of statistical mechanics (sometimes now called statistical physics) have been applied to everything from materials science and magnets to traffic jams and voting behavior. Besides that, statistical mechanics established the role of probabilistic math in the physical sciences. Willard Gibbs, late 19th centuryīy explaining heat in terms of the statistical behavior of atoms and molecules, statistical mechanics made sense of thermodynamics and also provided strong evidence for the reality of atoms. Statistical mechanics: James Clerk Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann, J. ![]() (Keep in mind that plate tectonics should not be confused with Plates Tectonic, a good name for a revolutionary science-theme restaurant.)Ħ. Wilson, a Canadian geophysicist, was a key contributor of some of the major pieces, while many other researchers also played prominent roles. But it wasn’t until the 1960s that scientists put the pieces together in a comprehensive theory of plate tectonics. ![]() Wegener realized that the continents drifted around as early as 1912. It was a much safer revolution for Lavoisier than the political one that soon followed in France, so revolutionary that Lavoisier lost his head over it.ħ. Lavoisier thereby did away with the prevailing phlogiston theory and paved the way for the development of modern chemistry. Lavoisier did not discover oxygen, but he figured out that it was the gas that combined with substances as they burned. Oxygen theory of combustion: Antoine Lavoisier, 1770s But don’t expect to learn anything about game theory by watching the movie version.Ĩ. John Nash won a Nobel Prize for his contributions to game theory, and his troubled life inspired the excellent book A Beautiful Mind. There is also even such a thing as quantum game theory, which is bound to revolutionize something someday. Game theory even applies to everyday activities like poker, football and negotiating for higher pay for bloggers. And evolutionary game theory is an important branch of the study of evolutionary biology. But it has been widely adopted by many other social sciences. ![]() Game theory: John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, 1944 (with important embellishments from John Nash in the 1950s)ĭeveloped for economics, where it has had some successes, game theory didn’t quite completely revolutionize that field. Without information theory, bits would still be just for drills.ĩ. But Shannon certainly provided the mathematical foundation for a lot of other revolutionary developments involving electronic communication and computer science. It’s not exactly the most revolutionary theory, since there really wasn’t a predecessor theory to revolutionize. Revolutionary theories succeed when the new framework makes it possible to solve problems that stymied the previous intellectual regime. Such makeovers, or paradigm shifts, reorder old knowledge into a new framework. Most scientific fields have been made over with a revolutionary theory at least once in recent centuries.
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