User: jon_moore

Thinking of some contenders ...

On: Genome

"the greatest intellectual moment in history".

On the strength of just the genome project and matters related to it? It may be very useful, but is hardly more interesting for requiring billions of AGCT sequences than a few thousand.

The most interesting ideas, IMHO, give great insights in forms which are often beautiful and compact. On these grounds filling a hard-disk's worth of mostly random data hardly counts.

Off the top of my head, here are some ideas that
start to justify "greatest ..." much more than the genome project ...

Invention of philosophy, history, drama, etc. as we know it in ancient Greece -- c 400 BC.

Shakespeare's tragedies -- c. 1600.

Darwin's theory of evolution -- c. 1850.

Discovery of general relativity and quantum mechanics, -- 1916-1930.

P.S. Feynman's thoughts in a similar vein

If, in some cataclysm, all scientific knowledge were to be destroyed,
and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures,
what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?
I believe it is the atomic hypothesis: that all things are made of
atoms, little particles that move around in perpetual motion,
attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but
repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence
you will see there's an enormous amount of information about the
world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.