Venkman Brown But i really think engineers are more valuable. Beatrice Shilling Alexander Kartveli Hedy Lamarr James Kindleberger and his team All the folks at Skunk works.
We don't know really how writting was invented. It's possible it's something it was invented multiple times, as there were mezoamerican civilizations who had their kind of writting also. Clearly, all unknown people that contributed to the development of writting would deserve attention.
Donald Trump. Donald trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump and Donald Trump They claim to know more then the consensus of all The science based institutes in the entire world on several key issues. Really,
Didn't Edison steal credit for an immense number of inventions and discoveries? Of course publishing and promoting inventions and discoveries is part of the deal too. It is quite possible that the Wright brothers were not the first to perfect manned, controlled, powered, heavier than air flight. But the Wrights published and promoted their work with massive amounts of documentation and even (rare for 1903) photographs.
Edison was a great inventor but not a scientist. He didn't discover anything or formulate any theories. And he was never formally educated. Much of his success was due to nothing but trial and error... slave labor other people did for him. He was also an anti-Semite and tremendously mean sob who abused the crap out of his employees. I learned about this when I won a grant in his name, LOL!
Why? He did a lot of early work in the practical application of AC power but not much else that I can recall. It was certainly significant but it doesn't come close to works like General Relativity.
It depends on how you look at it. General Relativity brought us the nuclear threat. Tesla brought us the electric motor. And I use the electric motor every day. I never use Relativity except to daydream about space travel and stuff. Interesting, but not as useful as an electric drill.
You use Relativity every time you watch TV or use the internet. Satellites depend on it. And you can't even make an old TV screen without Relativity. And he didn't invent electric motors. He invented 3-phase power He promoted AC power over DC. It was simply more efficient than DC power because it allowed for induction transformers, which allow you to change the voltage with very little energy lost. And inventing one useful thing doesn't make someone a god. It didn't require some fantastic leap of intellect as did Relativity or Quantum mechanics. I wasn't disputing that what he did was important. But it wasn't a great leap forward in human knowledge, as with Einstein, Maxwell, Heisenberg, Bohr, Dirac, and so many other truly great minds in history. Tesla mainly gets his celebrity status because of the crackpot myths about his work and the dramatic photos of his high-voltage coils. In fact evidence suggests that he himself promoted some of the crackpot claims that remain to this day. He may have been as much showman as engineer. And most importantly, he wasn't a scientist. He was an engineer. And what he did was engineering, not science.
Specifically, Tesla the engineer has Faraday [and Joseph Henry] the physicist to thank for his success. These are the equations physicists provided that Telsa exploited. Were it not for the physics, the engineering never would have happened. Once the physics was discovered, the engineering was inevitable. If not Tesla it soon would have been someone else.
Heh, yes, for most people I'm sure that doesn't make a lot of sense. But it is the physics that underlies Tesla's engineering. By using these equations, he designed a transformer to produce fantastically high voltages. Loosely, it tells us that the emf, which is a measure of the voltage change along a coil of wire [in this case], is equal to the rate of change of the strength of a magnetic field passing through that loop. It is why transformers work. DC power doesn't change like AC. It is just a constant value. AC power [voltage and current] is constantly cycling from high to low to high again, or from positive to negative to positive again. That is why you can't transform DC power directly. Transformers require a changing field.
BTW, in an old picture tube, even going back to black and white TVs, electrons are propelled forward by an electric field, which then strike the back of the screen and produce points of light. The electrons are moving so fast that their mass increases due to relativistic effects. And they have to be steered, which requires knowledge of their mass and electric field strength. So in order to calculate where an electron will strike the screen as part of an image, the equations from Relativity are required.
An interesting note: For the picture tube problem, Relativity comes into play for the electric fields as well. But it turns out that before we even knew it, Relativity was build into Classical Electrodynamics from the late 1800s. So the work of Maxwell and others who who came a little before Einstein, had unknowingly accounted for Relativity in terms of electric fields E and magnetic fields B This is what they look like in all of their glory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liénard–Wiechert_potential This came gushing out when the delay due to the speed of light, for changes in an electric field to be detected at a distance, were considered. In other words, by recognizing that all information has a speed limit, they inadvertently accounted for Relativity,
Rather than a top five, I'd just talk about guys that spoke to me. It's a personal thing, but my opinion is that the first real scientist was Kepler. His results weren't at all what he wanted, but he let them stand. Richard Feynam was really something. Another guy was Stephen Jay Gould. There was a German Jewish surgeon in WW1 that discovered mass action in the brain. He wrote a book about it, and it's a terrific book, as are a number of the books Feynman and Gould wrote. Just FYI, the WW1 book is OOP, I don't remember the name and it's almost impossible to find. If you want to read it, I'd suggest talking to a research librarian at a university.
