Who in the last 500 years will make the biggest impact on the next 500 years?

[Ted Striker]

damn

[Bosh]

Jawaharlal Nehru or other Indian who will be seen by posterity as putting India on the track that its going to take for the next 500 years.

I guess a very good case could be made for Deng Xiaoping as well.

You've got to nominate people besides whities, Asia's going to be calling the shots 500 years from now.

[Imran Siddiqui]

In that vein, Deng Xiopeng (sp?) deserves to be on the list.

[Bosh]

Damn, was editing him in just while you were posting it. It seems that I post things at exactly the same time as Imran far too much

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Tim Berners-Lee.

As a figure from history, he's nowhere near as important as Marx, Adam Smith, Darwin, or Freud (can't believe no one's mentioned Freud yet). But if we're talking not about history but about the future, nothing that any of those guys did is going to effect the next 500 years the way that developing HTML will. He's our Gutenberg.

[Jon Miller]

Originally posted by Winston
How about a guy like Stephen Hawking, especially if his work on a unified theory of physics is succesfully concluded, either by himself (unlikely) or by future generations of scientists.

Stephen Hawking is not even the most important grand theorist of today.

Jon Miller

[DanS]

Who is?

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Ogie Oglethorpe
I think Einstein who essentially fathered quantum mechanics

not really

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by Bosh
Damn, was editing him in just while you were posting it. It seems that I post things at exactly the same time as Imran far too much

[KrazyHorse]

QM is the bastard child of about 10 major contributors.

Einstein is in the second tier of contributions to its development.

Above him are: Bohr, Born, Bose, de Broglie, Dirac, Heisenberg, Pauli, Planck and Schrodinger

Planck is probably as close to a father of QM as you can get.

[KrazyHorse]

That the photoelectric effect is a demonstration of the quantisation of light into photons is important, but the existence of the photon had alread been postulated a decade earlier, and was at least accepted as a working despcription (the only one which properly described blackbody radiation).

[Japher]

TED TURNER

[KrazyHorse]

If you want to give it to a fundamental quantum mechanics dude, you can give it to either Planck or Heisenberg

If you want to give it to any physicist from the last century then my vote will probably go to L.D. Landau, whose work has not yet seen its full application (it's coming in the next century). Boltzmann wouldn't be a bad choice either (if you want to extend it back a few decades)

Einstein is, IMO, the greatest physicist of the last century in terms of pure brilliance. Dirac is a distant second. Neither made the most important contributions to human development, by any stretch of the imagination.

The problem with 500 years is that it is overbroad, IMO. If I were to use the full 500 then Isaac Newton is far and away the single most important scientific figure. There's no competition. His codiscovery of the infinitesimal calculus, the simple brilliance of the laws of motion (still ridiculously useful, as they will continue to be for all time), contributions to optics and the law of universal gravitation make him unapproachable in the scientific realm. Thermal physicists and engineers from the late 18th century provide another impossible hurdle for modern figures to approach, as everything they do is built on the giant strides taken before them.

[Lancer]

Sir Alexander Flemming.

Discovered penicillin by accident, the forerunner of all antibiotics. If he hadn't the population would be much smaller now as disease would have kept population under control. Also, antibiotics are starting to fail as diseases adapt which will likely lead to the greatest epidemic in human history as disease catches up with population growth, well within the next 500 years imo. Like the population of Hawaii after the arrival of 'white' diseases, (Over 90% perished) much of the world population may become victims.

[KrazyHorse]

If he hadn't the population would be much smaller now as disease would have kept population under control.

I don't know. World population had already reached around 2 billion by the time pennicillin came around. Likely the West would just have a higher birthrate to keep up with increased death rate.