What was the most 'revolutionary' scientific theory of all time?

Most Earth-Shattering?




E=mc2....we are all doomed now

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As an aside, do you think this is it for revolutionary theories? Are there any assumptions left to shake on the scale of "Earth is the centre of the universe"?

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Why is there a "you" locked into your brain? Why is there any subjective experience of anything? A convincing scientific answer to these questions will beat Einstein and Copernicus combined.

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Not entirely recognized as true anymore, but in terms of beeing revolutionary at its time I think Freudianism (and possibly Marxism) are the only things that can compete with evolution. Most scientific theories (relativity, heliocentricity, quantum mechanics, etc) might have been revolutionary ideas within their fields. But they were not nearly as strongly reacted to in the broader culture as the previous 3 theories.

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Marxism as the most revolutionary scientific theory of all time? Ummmm, okay.

[benkahuna]

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Marxism as the most revolutionary scientific theory of all time? Ummmm, okay.

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It's probably the most important liberal social theory and profoundly impacted both the field of sociology and many world governments.

Not scientific though.

[benkahuna]

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Why is there a "you" locked into your brain? Why is there any subjective experience of anything? A convincing scientific answer to these questions will beat Einstein and Copernicus combined.

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I agree. Til then we're stuck with the guys we have.

[tolbiny]

Which ever half man/half monkey harnessed fire. He pwned the next 60,000 years.

Quantum theory was certainly revolutionary, and it still clashes with human intuition as forcefully now as ever. There is a never ending debate over which "picture" captures the "true, physical meaning" of QM, but of course they all make the same predictions...

Evolution makes a bid, but after all it's only life on earth. Finding out that the entire universe behaves like nothing you would ever dream of is hard to trump.

"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum mechanics has not understood it."

[gumpzilla]

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Evolution makes a bid, but after all it's only life on earth. Finding out that the entire universe behaves like nothing you would ever dream of is hard to trump.

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Of course, the only entities that are shocked by quantum mechanics are a subset of life on earth, if we're going to take that attitude to it.

It's a bit of a silly question, as there's not a very good, obvious way to quantify "revolutionarity" in all of the different fields. In terms of impact on the world at large, I don't really see that evolution and quantum mechanics have any real competition, and the impact of quantum mechanics is indirect, so I'd vote for evolution.

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In terms of impact on the world at large, I don't really see that evolution and quantum mechanics have any real competition, and the impact of quantum mechanics is indirect, so I'd vote for evolution.

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I will debate you a bit, here. Evolution does not change the way biology gets done in a biology lab (unless you study evolution, or perhaps if you specifically look at mutation rates of pathogens). On the other hand, quantum mechanics is an absolute requirement in solid state physics, which is directly responsible for the communication/computation revolution. The impact on your life and, in fact, a huge fraction of our modern economy, could not be more direct.

[gumpzilla]

Sure, solid-state electronics is amazingly important; that's what I was referring to by indirect influence. The reason I say it's indirect is that while the transistor itself is clearly very important, this isn't quantum mechanics itself but an application of it. Evolution as an idea in itself has been substantially more culturally important, I think.

I'm also not 100% sure that the transistor couldn't have been stumbled upon even without a quantum mechanical theory of solids. To make a serious case for this, I'd have to do some looking in to the history of semiconductors and see what was known before ~1930 or so. This is very likely not a sensible or very good assertion, but I like being difficult sometimes. That said, I can certainly imagine that one might be able to come up with rough, phenomenological theories that explain pn junctions and the like, at least well enough to make discovering the transistor possible; I don't think electrical engineers get the full on QM treatment when they learn about these things.