It is in that spirit that this essay is composed. I haven't had a whole lot of ideas, and when I threw away the bad ones, not many remained — but I think this is one of them, and I'm going to leave it to you to judge.

I've been an educator for forty years, and am astonished at how little the typical high school graduate knows about what are the really important milestones of man's achievements. Whether it's literature, history, science, mathematics, or music, the typical high school graduate, sad to say, doesn't know jack. There's a really simple reason for that: we don't have courses that spell out what these milestones are. Not knowing what they are, we don't teach them — and we most certainly should.

So here's my idea — and I'm going to kick-start it in this essay. I believe that we should poll an important community of experts as to what they consider the milestones in their area to be. Each expert would be given a ballot and asked to list what he or she considered the ten most important milestones (or creative achievements) in his or her field. Count the ballots, and teach the Top Ten in a course.

I don't think even Linus Pauling wouldn't have thrown this idea out. You get absolutely the most important stuff, and what is more, undoubtedly the most interesting stuff. People love Top Ten lists — and the controversy they provoke. When the American Film Institute put out its Top 100 films, you think anybody cared about Number 73? Why not let the National Academy of Science vote on the ten most significant scientific developments of all time, and construct a one-semester course on them? You'd instantly create a lot more scientifically literate a citizenry — and the same goes for history or literature.

I said I was going to kick-start this, and so, even though I'm not a member of the National Academy of Sciences, here's my Top Ten list of the most important scientific developments of all time — counting down in reverse order to increase the suspense.

My guess is that when you read this, if you're a scientist you'll probably disagree with it — but if you're a non-scientist you'll learn something and maybe even be motivated to read some more about these, or other developments.

10. The Theory of Evolution (Charles Darwin, Alfred Wallace)

I give Wallace equal credit with Darwin, as he was the victim of enormous bad luck. Darwin had been fortunate to come from a well-to-do family; his father was a wealthy doctor and his uncle, Josiah Wedgwood, was the head of the famous Wedgwood pottery manufacturers. As a result, Darwin could afford to take a position as unpaid naturalist on the H.M.S. Beagle when it sailed for the Galapagos Islands off Ecuador in 1831. Alfred Wallace, however, had to earn a living, and so he became a surveyor. He later decided that he would rather try to make a living doing what he liked. In order to make a living as a naturalist he set sail in 1848 for South America to collect rare species. Four years of observing the profusion of life in the Amazon valley led Wallace to many of the same ideas that had occurred to Darwin. Unfortunately, after he had assembled his collection, he departed for England on a boat carrying a load of resin, a highly flammable substance. With typical Wallace luck, the boat caught fire, and the results of his four years of collecting were totally destroyed.

9. The Discovery of the Anthrax Bacillus (Robert Koch)

In the process of tracking down the cause of anthrax, Koch not only showed that a specific micro-organism was responsible for a specific disease, he established a methodology for the process of finding the causes of disease. This methodology became known as 'Koch's Postulates', and is still in use today.

8. The Laws of Thermodynamics (Ludwig Boltzmann, Sadi Carnot, James Joule)

The First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics provide the energy book-keeping of the Universe. They seem to appear in so many diverse environments that they have become part of our collective 'understanding' of life: the First Law (the Conservation of Energy) says you can't win, and the Second Law (some energy is always lost in reversible processes) says you can't even hope to break even.

7. The Germ Theory of Disease (Louis Pasteur)

Of all Pasteur's achievements, the one which had the most profound impact was his disproof of the theory of spontaneous generation. This theory held that micro-organisms, some of which Pasteur had investigated earlier in finding causes for the souring of wine and a disease afflicting silkworms, arose spontaneously in the substances in which they appeared. In an elegant series of experiments, Pasteur demonstrated that micro-organisms were contained in the air, and that if substances were placed in a sterile environment and prevented from contact with air, micro-organisms would not appear. This discovery gave considerable impetus to the germ theory of disease.

6. Quantum Mechanics (Max Planck)

Rarely does a scientific theory have both profound scientific, commercial, and philosophical consequences. Quantum mechanics is the most accurate theory of the sub-atomic Universe, is responsible for most of the micro-electronic gadgetry that impacts our lives, and makes us question assumptions that had existed for millennia about the nature of reality.

5. The Periodic Table of the Elements (Dmitri Mendeleyev)

One of the great organizing principles of science, the Periodic Table enabled Mendeleyev not only to explain why certain elements have similar behavior, but to predict the existence and properties of elements that had not yet been discovered.

4. The Principle of Electromagnetic Induction (Michael Faraday)

The almost complete dependence of civilization on electrical power is a consequence of one of the most important experiments in the history of science. In 1831, Michael Faraday demonstrated that, if a magnet were moved through a coil of wire, an electric current would flow in the wire. This is known as the principle of electromagnetic induction, and is the basis for the production of electricity.

3. The Discovery of Bacteria (Anton von Leeuwenhoek)

What makes Leewenhoek's discovery doubly significant is not only the discovery of an unknown world, but the impact that it has had on medicine. In Leeuwenhoek's day, disease was believed to be caused by evil spirits, and the attempts to cure disease often bordered on what we would nowadays call witchcraft. Although it would be nearly two centuries until bacteria were actually associated with disease, without the observations Leeuwenhoek made medicine would never have emerged from the Dark Ages.

2. The Atomic Theory (John Dalton)

In 1961, the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman began the basic physics course at Caltech with the following words: "If, in some cataclysm, all of 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...."

And the winner is (the envelope, please)...

1. The Scientific Revolution: Mechanics and Gravitation (Isaac Newton)

Science today is characterized by the scientific method, which consists of gathering data and devising an explanation to fit the data. The acid test of the explanation is its ability to account for phenomena that are not part of the data from which the explanation was constructed. During his two years in the country while the Black Death ravaged London, Newton invented the calculus, a branch of mathematics which went far beyond the geometry of the Greeks and the algebra of the Arabs. During the next two decades, he used calculus to devise his theories of mechanics and gravitation, both of which described how objects move.

The poet Wordsworth absolutely nailed it when, on viewing a bust of Newton, he was struck by

"The marble index of a mind forever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone."

÷ ÷ ÷

James D. Stein is a professor of mathematics at California State University, Long Beach. A graduate of Yale University and the University of California, Berkeley, he lives in Redondo Beach, California.