Hairy Men who changed the world.
Ever since the episode of Samson and Delilah it has been clear that there is mysterious relationship between hairiness and strength. Samson's strength was physical as demonstrated by him slaying 1000 Philistines with an asses jaw-bone. His mental prowess was a bit less impressive however, as Delilah was able without breaking a sweat to get him to reveal the secret source of his strength. Snip, snip, snip, and then he was off to Gaza in chains.
The hairy men below however were true intellectual giants.
Galileo
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Galileo was a man determined to find out how the world actually works, as distinct from the accounts that were derived from tradition or higher authority. He did experiments to measure how objects move under gravity, he made the first proper astronomical telescope and used it to accumulate evidence regarding the vexed question of whether the sun went round the earth or vice-versa. Far from due reward for his amazing discoveries, his life ended in frustration, a demeaning trial, and house arrest.
Moral: Don't mess with religious authorities when they have actual power !
Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev
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Mendeleyev had the brilliant notion that the chemical elements, the basic
materials out of which life , the universe and everything is made, are not just
random occurrences, but conform to a basic law expressed in his Periodic
Table. Initially received with skepticism, the idea soon caught on when he
was able to use his ideas to predict the existence of elements that had not so
far been discovered but which were later found with the properties that he
predicted.
Chemistry was never the same after that, and Mendeleyev was quite rightly honored
as one of the founders of modern chemistry.
Charles Darwin
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Charles Darwin lived at a time when most men believed that man and the
other animals and living creatures had been created in a single dramatic act at
some fairly recent time. His outrageous idea was not only that everything was
related to every other living thing through a process that he called
evolution but that it had taken place over an immensely long period of time.
He proposed a mechanism for evolution that used the perfectly reasonable
idea of natural variation of living things, along with the idea of
survival of the fittest as expressing the reality of animals living in
competition. By collecting an extraordinary amount of information about living
things he was able to put forward a persuasive argument that that this mechanism
was sufficient to account for what is actually found.
Putting forward this view took a great deal of courage as there was no knowledge
at that time as to how the inheritance of animal characteristic actually
takes place, and also no understanding of how the sun might have generated heat
for long enough to keep the Earth warm enough for this process to take place.
Since then both these problems have been resolved, and Darwin's idea is the only
idea on the table for sensible discussion.
Louis Pasteur
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Pasteur made innumerable discoveries and inventions in agriculture, chemistry, and medicine, which are of immense and continuing benefit to mankind. The odds are certainly high that any presently living individual ( You or I ) only survive on account of his work on vaccination and pasteurization.
Sir William Henry Perkin
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Perkin was only a young man starting his training as a chemist, when during the Easter holiday experimenting at home trying to synthesize quinine, he stumbled on a purple substance derived from the coal tar fraction containing aniline. At that time the only dyestuffs available were naturally occurring materials like indigo and madder. He was so convinced by the value of his discovery that he gave up college and with the financial help of his father set up a business to make what he called Mauveine . The market exploded with demand for the new fabric colour and it was the start of the whole dyestuffs chemical industry. After becoming rather rich, he sold out his business and returned to college as a professor of chemistry.
His beard became a legend in chemistry laboratories. In those early days of organic chemistry, identification of substances depended critically on being able to purify materials, and a key process was to be able to crystallize a substance. Whether a material will crystallize often depends on traces of contamination, possibly from the air, and the legend developed that Perkins' beard had collected traces of every conceivable substance from his long years as a practical chemist, so that he only had to shake it over a beaker for the material to start crystallizing.
Karl Marx
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Although made into a religious belief by the USSR, the analysis of the
economic basis of the newly emerging industrial society of the 19th century
conducted by Marx was a groundbreaking effort in understanding how human
societies work.
Although he died in 1883, his ideas could be said to been one of the most
dominant influences on the course of human history in the 20th century.
Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen
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Roentgen discovered X-rays in 1895. For the first time it was possible to look inside a human body without cutting it open. The medical significance was immediate and far reaching and the novelty of the technique resulted in the whole world going " X-ray crazy " for a period at the start of the 20th century.
Albert Einstein
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Albert Einstein was the archetypal genius. At a time when most of great
scientists thought that they had virtually figured out how the universe worked,
he came as a young unknown man, working in the Patents Office in Berne, to show
them that the whole basis was wrong. His great idea was relativity which
made the idea of universal time obsolete.
It did more than that by providing a basis for the relationship between mass and
energy which is expressed by the famous equation E = mc2
Which eventually showed people that you could have atomic energy.
E.J.Pearson June 2005