The Great Minds of the Century
This is the century that split the atom, probed the psyche, spliced genes and cloned a sheep. It invented plastic, radar and the silicon chip. It built airplanes, rockets, satellites, televisions, computers and atom bombs. It overthrew our inherited ideas about logic, language, learning, mathematics, economics and even space and time. And behind each of these great ideas, great discoveries and great inventions is, in most cases, one extraordinary human mind.
Letter from the Editor:
How we chose this century's 20 most influential scientists, thinkers and inventors
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Visit our TIME 100 Scientists & Thinkers special report (pages open in a new browser window)
• Sigmund Freud
His theories turned the unconscious into a battleground
• Leo Baekeland
He made the stuff from which stuff is made
• Wilbur & Orville Wright
Their fledgling flight radically opened our horizons
• Albert Einstein
He found the essential structure of the cosmos in his head
• Alexander Fleming
The discovery of penicillin was a miraculous accident
• Robert Goddard
Mockery pushed him to make rockets that soared
• John Maynard Keynes
Pushing government spending, he may have saved capitalism
• Edwin Hubble
He discovered the universe is vast--and getting bigger
• Ludwig Wittgenstein
He taught us to be suspicious of what we think of our minds
• Jean Piaget
His learning about children changed the way we teach them
• Enrico Fermi
He harnessed nuclear energy, though not its implications
• Louis, Mary & Richard Leakey
They shaped what we know about where we come from
• Philo Farnsworth
An ordinary Joe and a teen genius, he invented the television
• Kurt Gödel
By turning mathematics upon itself, he proved its limits
• Rachel Carson
A brave book spawned the modern environmental movement
• William Shockley
A cloud of racial hate hovered over the father of the transistor
• Alan Turing
From his ideas came a machine to mimic human reasoning
• Jonas Salk
Discovering a polio vaccine, he found fame and enemies
• James Watson & Francis Crick
It took partners to find the secret of life in complementarity
• Tim Berners-Lee
His World Wide Web created a mass medium for our times
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