Sir Tim: 2nd most important 20thC scientist

[matgb]

"Berners-Lee elected not to patent the World Wide Web for commercial reasons or his own personal profit but gave it away for all of us," Klaus Riebschlaeger, chairman of the organising committee told Reuters. "Free and available to all humanity, it became the network for knowledge linking the world."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/18/berners_lee_award/

And a good thing he did. Still, second only to Einstein in 20th Century scientists? On the one hand, not sure I agree, on the other, can't think of anyone that rates more important off the top of my head. Hawking?

In other news, the proposals to re-introduce megafauna to the North American continent are interesting. Some of the comments on Slashdot made me chuckle though
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/18/1320228&from=rss
Especially this one

Comments

[shadow-exe.livejournal.com]

Watson & Crick? (Co-discoverers of DNA)

Fermi? (Developer of nuclear pile)

Erwin Schrödinger? (Made Quantum Mechanics usable, rather than just intriguing.)

As for the megafauna, it'd give rednecks more variety of things to shoot at, so maybe their President wouldn't have to keep sending them to the Middle East.

[matgb]

I've actually heard of all of them, so possible contenders; articles doesn't actually give a list so I suspect they're just concentrating on Tim as, well, website news source.

All I know about Schrödinger is his cat, but that's a good enough example (ie, I understand it) that he may be on to something.

But still, half the point of posting the story is tog et the likes of you and John to give me some hints at who I'm missing out :-)