Scientist

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 408.

Writer

The sheer volume of writing produced in the last 1,000 years is staggering. Especially with Gutenberg's invention, a world of words was created that has continued to grow exponentially. Accordingly, there is a galaxy of brilliant writers from which to select one writer as the most influential in the second millennium. In reality, however, there is only one person who has the literary resume to even apply for the job: William Shakespeare. Nearly 400 years after his death, the English playwright and poet remains the most influential writer who ever lived.

Shakespeare's central canon of 38 plays and a series of 154 sonnets is the standard against which all other writers are measured. His language, characters, plots, and wit are all consistently brilliant. Tragedies such as Romeo and Juliet (1595?), Hamlet (1601?), and King Lear (1605?) have survived the centuries with their beauty and power intact and remain some of the most popular and oft-produced plays. His comedies, including A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595?) and Twelfth Night (1600?), still charm and entertain. As many critics have observed, the tragic flaws and comic conceits depicted in Shakespeare's plays are just as relevant at the end of the 20th century as they were when the plays were written in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

The man who is sometimes known simply as the Bard also heavily influenced the English language, which has emerged as the dominant tongue of the Western world. He created and popularized many words that survive in the English language today, and his famed lines are arguably the best known in all of literature: “Get thee to a nunnery,” “The lady doth protest too much,” and “Et tu, Brute?” are just a few of the many Shakespearean lines still commonly quoted. Other languages have their beloved writers, but all languages and lands pay homage to Shakespeare.

There were countless major scientific breakthroughs during the last millennium. To choose one scientist who stands out over the rest requires weighing not just the individual's accomplishments, but also how he or she changed the process of scientific discovery itself. This criterion leads us to Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei, who pioneered important aspects of what today is known as the scientific method.

Galileo was born near Pisa in 1564—the same year Shakespeare was born and Michelangelo died. In 1589, while a professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa, Galileo began to conduct experiments testing Aristotle's theory that the speed of a fall is dependent on the weight of the falling object. Others had questioned the theory in the past, but Galileo was the first to use scientific experiments to disprove it—by dropping objects of different weights from the Tower of Pisa, legend has it. This method of developing a hypothesis and then performing an experiment to see if the hypothesis was true or false established physics as a precise science, bringing science as a whole out of the realm of natural philosophy and into the modern era.

Galileo's contributions to scientific knowledge were also significant. He built the first telescope for astronomical purposes, observed that the Milky Way consisted of stars, articulated the laws of bodies in motion, and discovered the Moon's craters, Jupiter's largest four satellites, sun spots, and the phases of Venus.

Galileo's ideas generated much controversy at the time, none more than his support for the then-heretical notion that the Earth was not the center of the universe. In his book Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems (1632), Galileo argued for the Copernican theory, which held that the Sun was the center of the solar system. After the book was published, Galileo was charged with and found guilty of heresy by the Roman Catholic Church. He died in 1642, but the fires of scientific revolution that he started still burn bright.