Most Impressive Accomplishment

[st.cronin]

Originally Posted by QuikSand

While many human accomplishments have had a greater direct impact, if the measure is "impressive" then I'd volunteer Einstein's development of his theory of relativity.

Many, many great scientific and practical advances were the result of experimentation and testing -- which certainly shouldn't be given short shrift. But by and large, Einstein's theories came from inside his own head, in a near absence of any experimental evidence (other than the puzzling result of some previous work, that had essentially been sitting around unsolved until he tied it together). He essentially puzzled out how he thought the world ought to work, and developed the entire theory based on that. Years later, as we started to catch up and develop suitably precise measurable experiments, we find that his theories predict pretty much everything we see on the scale that he analyzed.

To me, that is an extraordinarily impressive achievement. Its merits and effects might be debatable, but in terms of simple human accomplishment, nothing really strikes me the way that this does.

Roger Boscovich intuited quantum mechanics (the need for it, and a rough idea of how it would work) before Einstein was even born, and as far as I know never gets any credit for it.