Tesla is definitely not #1, sorry. He's top 5 though for sure.

turn on abc, they're about to do a hotwheels double loop...with real cars.

Giorgio Tsoukalos is easily top 10 imo

that sounds about right


only thing that saved us was that each cart had a built in cooler with ice so our drinks stayed cold

lol wat
his work with phage/complementation studies were a huge leap in the understanding of genes

Look, I never said he didn't do groundbreaking things and wasn't a great biologist. I just don't consider him in, say, the top 10-20 of all ****ing time.

The way I understand it, he was only part of a group that did the phage work which then led to his work on nucleic acids anyway.

Plus, he's a racist prick.

I think we all know that Hubert Farnsworth is the clear #1 choice

Tesla must have been an incredible hype man if people think he was a top 5 scientist of all time. I'm sure he was a badass engineer/inventor, but scanning his wiki page I don't see the induction motor and AC power delivery as being top 5 material. (Transistors and integrated circuits are pretty important too, but I don't see people hoisting up John Bardeen and Jack Kirby as top 5 GOAT scientists across all genres.) In terms of basic scientific discoveries, there are several people in E+M alone that would be more influential than Tesla (Maxwell and Faraday are obvious) and across all of physics probably dozens of guys you'd pick ahead of him. Most of them have less name recognition to the general public, obviously.

tho

PRIESTLY
LAVOISIER
BOYLE
The monk who messed around with fruit flys and figured out selective breeding

I have einstein > newton because calculus was invented independently elsewhere at roughly the same time, whereas Einstein's discoveries would've likely taken a long time without him.

Tesla basically invented radio and built our entire modern electric power system. His work with electromagnetism was redonkulous

BASaint, the monk is Gregor Mendel (pea plants, not fruit flies) and I've been debating where to put him.

tesla was a crazy person who claimed he invented a bunch of impossible **** near the end of his life which i assume influences the popular perception of him.

he was still awesome though.
growing potatoes is absurdly easy. it took me maybe an hour to plant a bunch of them and it's ~2 minutes to dig some up. one time i spent 10 or so minutes dumping some sevin on them. that's it.

i'd probably expend about the same amount of energy going to the store to buy them.

Mendel belongs well above Watson and crick wherever you'd take them.

Tesla is Edison but better and less plageristic. He also wasn't a huge douche. He was bat**** though.

I was actually gonna throw some props to Shockley & Crew and Noyce and Kilby.

also lol @ AC power delivery not being ****ing huge.

da vinci not gettin any love?

somehow i didn't peg phildo as a potato farmer

Tim Berners-Lee yo

We just had a gardening discussion like a week ago and now growing potatoes is weird?

They're the easiest thing ever, you can literally chop up a few seed potatoes and just chuck them in the ground. Few months later you dig the plants up. That's it.

Not really that much of a scientist. I mean he obv contributed but a ton of his inventions weren't really functional. Plus, I have a hard time ranking those early guys anyway because with a few exceptions their accomplishments are sort of nebulous.

In terms of ubiquity in modern civilization, sure, it's definitely a very useful technology. But one can say that about a lot of other things too. Frozen food is pretty rad, but I don't think Clarence Birdseye is 1st round material in this draft. I don't think AC power delivery was a particularly profound idea; had Tesla not done work on it, it seems like a near certainty somebody else would have at basically the same time.

If by nebulous you mean "enabled everything that followed after", sure.

great. science hipsters.

That's a little simplistic. I mean it's one thing to invent higher level math its another to design a gyro copter that doesn't fly and then claim you influenced Bernoulli.

i was trying to think of some good responses to this, and then it turns out, this is already a thing

http://hipstersci.tumblr.com/

I'm intrigued by this potato talk. Are they really that easy to grow?