Question: Which scientist do you think made the biggest advance?

Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 23 Jun 2014:

mmmm… That’s a really tough one, joshua904!!!
There are few names that pop into my mind, like Newton, Volta, Maxwell, Boltzmann (often forgotten, but he invented statistical physics at a time where people didn’t think atoms existed!!!), Einstein, Feynman, Planck, Pasteur, Marie Curie, Darwin, or even Aristotle!!
Basically, all the ones that have something named after them have done something pretty major. Then judging what is the ‘biggest’ is pretty subjective, at least according to me.

And that’s not the only reason I’m not able to decide. Every time I think of someone, I think ‘Well, they wouldn’t have come up with that with the other ones who prepared the field and discovered all those other things before…’ Would Einstein have discovered anything without Planck (quantizing the photon for the photovoltaic effect) and Lorentz (inventing the transformations for special relativity)?

What I mean is that discoveries and advances don’t come out of the blue in science. There are always a number of people who discover weird phenomena, like Galvani and Volta, and other discover even weirder things in experiments, like Ørsted and Ampère realized that an electric current makes a magnetic field, and people who bring these things together like Faraday to make new inventions, and they finally after decades of mysteries, someone finally understand how electricity and magnetism are actually the same thing (in this case Maxwell). That seems like a HUGE breakthrough, and don’t take me wrong I do think Maxwell was a genius, but the buildup of discoveries and the scientific context was right for that final discovery to happen. If it hadn’t been for Maxwell, maybe we would have had to wait couple more decades, but eventually electromagnetism would have been discovered anyway.

So it’s really about that idea of ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants.’ (Like Newton said in a different context). Some people have great vision, but eventually, it’s about the efforts of the whole scientific community altogether when it comes to making new discoveries.