Items19The creator’s order
  1. 1Johannes KeplerJohannes KeplerBorn 27 Dec 1571Johannes Kepler spent years trying to fit the orbit of Mars to circles, as astronomers had done since antiquity, using Tycho Brahe's precise observations. A persistent mismatch of eight minutes of arc would not go away, and he refused to ignore it. In Astronomia Nova in 1609 he set out his failed…0i
  2. 2Thomas Henry HuxleyThomas Henry HuxleyBorn 4 May 1825Thomas Henry Huxley had been openly sceptical of earlier theories of the transmutation of species, reviewing them harshly in the 1850s. Reading Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859 changed his mind, and by his own later account he thought "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!" He…0i
  3. 3Charles LyellCharles LyellBorn 14 Nov 1797Charles Lyell, the leading geologist of his age, argued against the transmutation of species in his Principles of Geology for over thirty years, even though his ideas about slow change had shaped Darwin's thinking. His 1863 book on human antiquity disappointed Darwin with its caution. In the tenth…0i
  4. 4Wilhelm OstwaldWilhelm OstwaldWilhelm Ostwald, a founder of physical chemistry, was the best-known opponent of atoms around 1900, arguing that chemistry should be built on energy alone. In 1909, in the preface to a new edition of his textbook, he wrote that experiments by Jean Perrin on Brownian motion and by J. J. Thomson on…0i
  5. 5Thomas Hunt MorganThomas Hunt MorganBorn 25 Sept 1866Thomas Hunt Morgan was openly sceptical in the 1900s of both Mendel's laws as a general explanation and the idea that genes sit on chromosomes. In 1910 a single white-eyed male fruit fly in his Columbia laboratory showed a pattern of inheritance tied to sex, and he changed course. With his students…0i
  6. 6Robert MillikanRobert MillikanBorn 22 Mar 1868Robert Millikan spent about ten years testing Einstein's equation for the photoelectric effect, expecting to show it was wrong. His 1916 results confirmed it precisely, and he published them as they were. He accepted the equation while remaining doubtful for some years about the light particles…0i
  7. 7William BatesonWilliam BatesonWilliam Bateson, who coined the word genetics and championed Mendel in Britain, long rejected Morgan's theory that genes are carried on chromosomes. After visiting Morgan's laboratory at the end of 1921 and seeing the fly work for himself, he publicly acknowledged in 1922 that the chromosome theory…0i
  8. 8Niels BohrNiels BohrBorn 7 Oct 1885Niels Bohr resisted Einstein's light particles for years, and in 1924 he, Hendrik Kramers and John Slater proposed a theory that gave them up at the cost of energy being conserved only on average. Experiments by Walther Bothe and Hans Geiger, and by Arthur Compton and Alfred Simon, showed in 1925…0i
  9. 9Albert EinsteinAlbert EinsteinBorn 14 Mar 1879Albert Einstein added a cosmological constant to his equations in 1917 to keep the universe static, and at first dismissed Alexander Friedmann's and Georges Lemaître's expanding solutions. After Edwin Hubble's measurements of receding galaxies, and a visit to Mount Wilson, he publicly dropped the…0i
  10. 10Arthur KeithArthur KeithBorn 5 Feb 1866Arthur Keith, among Britain's most powerful anatomists, dismissed Raymond Dart's 1925 claim that the Taung child skull was an early human relative, calling it closer to an ape. As Robert Broom found adult australopithecine fossils in South Africa, Keith changed his view, and in 1947 he wrote…0i