Most important scientific work ever written?

**KrakenEater** · Joined: 21 Jan 2008 Posts: 1053 Location: Seattle, WA

What do you think the most important scientific work is?

I think it is probably Principia by Newton. That was his main work, which gave his laws of motion (even though they weren't all his...) and his theory of gravity. It was revolutionary for its time, and got Newton a bunch of honors (first person knighted for scientific reasons, monument in Westminister Abbey, etc).

Other possible works I've heard people mention are On the Origin of Species by Darwin, some stuff by Galileo, Einstein, Copernicious, Mendel, and a few others. What do you think?

(I realize "most important" is pretty ambiguous. The criteria I'm using are: changing what people think, increasing our scientific pool of knowledge and affecting humanity in general.)
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**Unpur3** · Posted: Sun Mar 22, 2009 8:38 pm Post subject:

Being someone who prefers physics I know where you're coming from with Newton's work on the laws of motion. Without this we would of had a lesser understanding of gravity. Newton really was lightyears ahead of his time (yes I know lightyears isn't a measurement of time

). But also don't forget that he helped to map out our solar system using his understanding of gravity and the way huge objects pull smaller objects towards them. His second law also lay the the groundwork for the relationship between force, mass and acceleration. Yey for Newton.

But its hard to say if any scientific work is more important than others, because some discoveries are tremendous because of their importance in the world of science, whilest others are important to the masses, who don't want to understand something exactly, but just use it to make life easier.
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**1ofakind** · Posted: Sun Mar 22, 2009 8:54 pm Post subject:

Since you already mentioned Newton, Galileo was another man who was ahead of his time when it comes to physics.

I would say more but I'm not one of them smart folk.

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**inkjt510** · Joined: 22 Mar 2008 Posts: 1213

I would have to say On The Origin of Species or On the Revolution of Heavenly Bodies.

I assume you're not including social science in this particular topic, which prevents me from naming works like Atlas Shrugged or Thus Spake Zarathustra.
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**geome** · Joined: 02 Jan 2008 Posts: 478

Does L'hopital's book on calculus count? We couldn't have discovered too much about the universe without calculus.

Euclid's "The Elements" is probably the most important, though. The foundation of many maths as we know them.

**KrakenEater** · Joined: 21 Jan 2008 Posts: 1053 Location: Seattle, WA

**dspoonrt** · Joined: 20 Feb 2006 Posts: 2449 Location: Columbus, OH

**Subrick** · Joined: 22 Mar 2008 Posts: 1382 Location: Terryville, CT

On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. Without this, science today would be radically different.
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**nbh2992** · Joined: 24 Jul 2007 Posts: 514

I too would like to toss in my vote for On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.

If not for impact, for controversy. No one even comes close to questioning Newton or Galileo's scientific work, but Darwin is still as hotly debated now as he was when his discoveries were first published.
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**jamesw** · Joined: 02 May 2008 Posts: 1264 Location: Canada

I would vote for the Periodic Table of Elements. Nobody had thought of arranging the atoms in the way they were, and because of this genius idea, scientists could accurately predict the properties of every single compound and element, before they were discovered. It may not be a document, but without it chemistry would have gotten nowhere.
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**Rawrspoon** · Joined: 04 Sep 2008 Posts: 1597

As I'm going into the field of Astrophysics, I'll say Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, it connected Special Relativity with Newton's universal gravitation. If not now, when we start exploring space this will be the most important scientific work of all

Edit: Holy shit, the Periodic table IS amazing, the accuracy and how it all fits just PERFECTLY is just amazing. Scratch my vote for above, Periodic Table is the most amazing discovery of all time

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**stryker** · Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 12:42 am Post subject:

On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, Albert Einstein (1905).

There's a distinct possibility that much of this work will be discarded in the coming decades, but it's the seminal work that enabled huge advanced in theoretical physics in the beginning of the 20th century. A great deal of what we know about the universe was resolved through the framework of Einstein's famous paper.

As an atmospheric scientist, I'm also partial to Edward Lorenz's 1962 thesis, Deterministic Nonperiod Flow.
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**0wnd1zzl3d** · Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 2:45 am Post subject: