cultcross said:
I'm sure this has been done before, so apologies,
But what, in your opinion, is the greatest scholarly work ever produced?
Is it Newton's Principia, the laying down of the mathematical basis of centuries of physical science?
Darwin's Origin of Species, which brought a revolution in Biology in its wake?
The Oxford English Dictionary, a collection of over 800,000 English words with their entire known histories and etymologies?
Or something completely different?
I'm interested to know what you consider to be the greatest piece of scholarship ever published...
It's more than a little tough to say. You'd certainly have to break it down by field.
As a biologist, my vote would go to Darwin's
On the origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, with honorable mentions to Robert Hooke's
Micrographia, Linnaeus'
Systema Naturae, Rudolf Virchow’s
Die Cellularpathologie, Edmund Wilson's
The Cell in Development and Heredity, and Ernst Mayr's
Systematics and the Origin of Species.
For other sciences, many great works have already been listed. There are a whole mess of papers published in
Annalen der Physik around the turn of the last century that deserve mention. Galileo's
Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems) and
Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche, intorno a due nuove scienze (Discourse on the Two New Sciences) as well as Maxwell's
A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field deserve nominations as well.
Deuterostome is correct. You should define greatest. Many of our well-known works of science in centuries past were written by men of means over the course of several years, and these men had very little in the way of competition in their fields. Since the dawn of the 20th century, our most remarkable breakthroughs have usually been collaborative (or competitive) efforts, coming in spurts, with many contributors. Take plate tectonics as an example. It is one of the greatest scientific revolutions in history, as significant to geology as Darwin's was to biology. To whom do we give the credit, though? Wegner had the idea more than 80 years ago, but the evidence that made it a theory came in a flurry of dozens of papers from dozens of different authors in just a few years.
The old science came in novel form. Today's science comes to us as individual chapters, from many different authors, and with many revisions. No matter how sarcastically it may have been delivered, Newton's use of the "shoulders of giants" metaphor is (and has always been) a good one. Today, it's easier for us to see who has the shoulders, but it doesn't make today's science any less remarkable.
