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Top 10 Revolutionary Scientific Theories
Top 10 Revolutionary Scientific Theories
History of Science
Alfred Wegener, shown here on a trip to Greenland in 1912–1913, proposed his ideas about continental drift as early as 1912,
a concept later incorporated into the revolutionary theory of plate tectonics.
Archive of Alfred Wegener Institute/Wikimedia Commons
Most scientific fields have been made over with a revolutionary theory at least once in recent
centuries. Such makeovers, or paradigm shifts, reorder old knowledge into a new framework.
Revolutionary theories succeed when the new framework makes it possible to solve problems that
stymied the previous intellectual regime. Here are my favorite revolutions. I’m hoping for more
before I die.
9. Game theory: John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, 1944 (with important
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6. Statistical mechanics: James Clerk Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann, J. Willard Gibbs, late
19th century
By explaining heat in terms of the statistical behavior of atoms and molecules, statistical mechanics
made sense of thermodynamics and also provided strong evidence for the reality of atoms. Besides
that, statistical mechanics established the role of probabilistic math in the physical sciences.
Modern extensions of statistical mechanics (sometimes now called statistical physics) have been
applied to everything from materials science and magnets to traffic jams and voting behavior. And
even game theory.
3. Quantum theory: Max Planck, Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin
Schrödinger, Max Born, Paul Dirac, 1900–1926
Quantum theory ripped the entire fabric of classical physics to shreds, demolished ordinary notions
of the nature of reality, screwed up entire philosophies of cause and effect and revealed
peculiarities about nature that nobody, no matter how imaginative, could ever have imagined.
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