Who was the most influential person of the last hundred years?

You can't count your Mom!

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Sir Ernest Rutherford (split the atom, 1938, Cambridge I think)

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Yeah but I don't think it would have necessarily made the world better. Loads of technological advancements are made in the time of war. I'm not saying war is a good thing though.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

/agree with mercury

if you think that only good things can be influential then hmmmm to you!

 

Thank you for agreeing with me. I feel honored, utmostly.

 

its funny, most people agree with you when ur right, but some don;t.

 

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Carved Mercury,

I don't think all the effects of WWI or any other war are necessarily good. Princip may not have had only a good effect on the world, that is not my contention. He did, however, in my opinion have the greatest effect on the world.

 

God:d

 

A Book I Ment The Bible Or God If U Like

 

Has to be A. Einstein, Uncle Al has ushered in more technology: lasers, transistors and modern CPU chips, just about any kind of detector you can think of except Geiger's one, (or ammeters galvanometers and vacuum tubes, they were in use before he came along), the electron microscope, etc. It's quite a big list and we wouldn't have any of it without his theories to explain light and how it interacts with matter (electrons and electric and magnetic fields).
But then "all" he did was explain what Maxwell's theories meant (his ideas about a certain set of observations), type of thing.
I guess R. Feynman could be a close runner-up because of how many of his ideas have been adopted into current thinking.

 

...Jack Bauer.

 

It is a very long and very indirect stretch to attribute any of those quantum mechanical to Einstein.

 

Mao.

He changed the fundamental social structure of a billion humans.

It's difficult to pick a positive influence in a Western culture....not because there aren't some great human beings but because democracies are much more insulated from the whims of any one individual.

Einstein? Not really. He's a bright star among stars but physics as a body would have and did surpass his breakthroughs.

 

"Mao.

He changed the fundamental social structure of a billion humans."



Did Mao really change the fundamental social structure of a billion humans or did he only force them to live as he wanted while he was alive. With Mao's death we find the Communist Chinese becoming less and less communist and more and more capitalist.

 

Who explained the photoelectric effect? How much influence did that paper have on developments since? Care to guess?

Sure, the second half of his life was presumably spent pursuing a futile attempt to overturn the Copenhagen interpretation and show that quantum behaviour was classical. But he still opened a lot of doors with his thinking that might be still shut. I read a SA issue about all the stuff we have, largely due to his ideas, so I'm not convinced he wasn't at least as influential as Newton.

 

I would suggest that the person who created the method of refining crude oil should get a mention. From the refining of crude oil you create a number of things including kerosene, gasoline, propane, butane and also assorted sludge which is in turn used to create asphalt to pave our roads and highways. Not to mention other by-products that have been created from the leftovers, such as the plastic and certain fibers used in all of your day to day products. Without this process, we would still be travelling on horseback over dirt roads, or roads paved with stones and blocks. We would be heating our homes with coal or wood and most people would not travel further than their own village or city. Of course with the positives of this also come the many negatives. Pollution, greenhouse gases, crowding and overpopulation, lack of food for all of the populaton since there are less people working the fields and more people moving to cities in their cars to pursue other ventures and so forth. Take away the person or persons who perfected the refining of crude oil and we would still be living in the 1800's. A good or bad thing depending on who you talk to.

 

I think a good case can be made for Arthur Zimmermann, German Foreign Minister in 1916-17. His name is most famously associated with a telegram, the true story of which is probably still not understood, but his greatest achievement was to finance the Russian Revolution. Without the colossal funds channelled by Zimmermann, aided by his dispatch of Lenin and company in the famous "sealed train" to Petrograd, it would not have happened. And the rise and fall of the Soviet Empire is THE biggest story -- militarily, politically, culturally -- of (more than seventy years of) the Twentieth Century.

Many things (including inventions) are "destined" to happen in the nature of things. The famous name is merely the winner of the race. Zimmermann MADE the Russian Revolution happen.

 

Walt Disney

 

Sure he forced them. Probably killed millions. He tore down the old social structure of a serf-based agrarian society. China, in less than a century is going to transform from a pre-Mao feudal state into the world's dominant economic power. This isn't about the 'nicest guy' in the last hundred years.