The top ten scientific discoveries of the century

The magazine Science News has reached in 2021 one hundred years (a century) of existence. To celebrate this anniversary, the magazine has published a list of what, according to its author, are the ten greatest scientific advances made between 1921 and 2021. This is the list, ordered according to the opinion of the article’s author about the importance of the discovery (from highest to lowest):

1. The uncertainty principle.
2. The existence of antimatter.
3. The expanding universe. As usual, this discovery is associated only with Edwin Hubble (1929), without taking into account that Georges Lemaître made the same discovery two years before, as I explained in this post. This fact has been officially recognized by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).
4. Atomic bomb and nuclear fission.
5. Dark matter.
6. Dark Energy.
7. DNA makes genes.
8. Plate Tectonics.
9. Inert gases make compounds.
10. Parity violation.

Each person may disagree with this order and propose their own. I think many of the selected discoveries deserve to be in this list, but there are two that shouldn't be there: numbers 5 and 6. Dark matter and dark energy have not been discovered. They are unverified theoretic explanations for certain phenomena: the rotation of galaxies and the spectrum of acoustic waves in the CMBR.

In the case of dark matter, all attempts to find the corresponding matter particles have failed to prove their existence. The case of dark energy is even worse, as we have no idea what it could be. Therefore, these two contributions should not be considered scientific discoveries. Maybe in the future they will be, but not for now.

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier

It is true that the Standard Cosmological Model postulates the existence of dark matter and dark energy. It is true that just now there is no clear alternative to that model. But that doesn't mean that it doesn’t exist. After all, the phlogiston theory was the standard way of explaining combustion and oxidation until Lavoisier came up with a better theory about one century later. Something like this could happen to the Standard Cosmological Model. If so, dark matter and dark energy would become phlogiston-like entelechies. It does not seem reasonable that their "discovery" appears on the list of the ten greatest scientific advances of the century.

Compared to the Standard Cosmological Model, Quantum Mechanics is a much better verified theory, as all attempts to break it down have failed, during the last century. However, this theory does not appear among the ten most important discoveries of the century. Perhaps it is supposed to be represented by the most important discovery in the list, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which is a consequence of Quantum Mechanics. By the way, it should be noted that this principle has not yet been experimentally proven, as I pointed out in this post.

The same post in Spanish

Thematic Thread about Science in General: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca