Scientists

Copernicus made ground-breaking discoveries relating to astronomy...

 

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Hubble
Shwarzchild

 

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No one's yet mentioned Galileo, either.

 

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RawThinkTank

He showed how to create a RTT Gravityscope to measure speed of Gravity.

http://www.sciforums.com/member.php?find=lastposter&t=38249

 

Yes and no. Freud was not a scientist. Psychoanalysis is the sine qua non of pseudo science.

Regardless of what you feel about the theory of evolution - if you think it was mistaken, if you think Darwin didn't originate the idea - makes no difference whatsover. Charles Darwin is incontestably one of the greatest scientists of all time. In his field (biological taxonomy) he was absolutely peerless. The level of detail, of sheer application he put into his work is absolutely staggering.

I've recently read that in fact he didn't. He looked at the solar system in a different way and came up with the heliocentric method of calculating the positions of the planets, but I think this is rather an "after the fact" discovery, in that after the heliocentric system (mainly promoted by Kepler and Galileo) was accepted, people looked back and found Copernicus's working out as being the earliest such reference to such a system. But since it was ignored at the time, you can't really describe what Copernicus did as "ground-breaking".

Has anybody mentioned Ernest Rutherford, James Clerk Maxwell or Henry Gwyn Jeffries Moseley?

 

but Freud was a psychologist and psychology is a science.

 

I think there can be no doubt that Sigmund Freud had a profound effect on the way that we regard psychological problems. The difficulty arises in exactly how he propounded his theories:

• Dreams and their relation to the unconscious. He stated that dreams were not mystical forecasts of the future, but were in fact a window on the subconscious, a way to tell what was really going on in the patient's mind. So far so good, but he went further to talk about symbology in dreams - most of which involved sexual desires and repression, without the slightest shred of evidence.
• The Ego, the SuperEgo and the Id. Freud divided the mind, the "subconscious" into these broad areas. People took it up and read it as Gospel. But there is no real indication that any of these are true or even if there is such a thing as the subconscious. They are possibly labels to attribute certain kinds of thoughts and desires and how those desires interact and are controlled (or not controlled) by the person. But the impression given were that these were real physical attributes of the mind - for which there is no evidence.
• Penis Envy and the Oedipus Complex. A great deal of psychological study over the past century has been irredemably coloured by reference to these supposed drives within people of either sex - the urge for a man to kill his father and replace him in his mother's affection, the woman's repressed feeling of absence of a penetrating organ and her jealousy thereof. Many many people have been treated incorrectly (and may continue to be to this day) because their conditions were shoehorned into these preconceived ideas, for which there is no rational scientific basis whatsoever.