Science Channel - Top 100 Discoveries.

The Science Channel aired the Top 10 Science Discoveries as voted on by the viewers last night. I caught a couple of them as I was flipping through channels:

#4. The periodic table. This was cool because Bill Nye (the host of the show) interviewed my introductory chemistry professor, Roald Hoffmann. I finally realized that Nye probably selected Hoffmann because he, too, attended Cornell. It was pretty neat having a Nobel Laureate teaching my first semester chemistry course. One of the most interested assignments that semester was a book report on The Periodic Table by Primo Levi -- a semi-autobiographical tale of a young man's interest in chemistry.

#1. Natural selection. Nye introduced it as a controversial theory, which it is amongst lay-people, but not amongst biologists. It is pretty awesome, though, that even with all the attacks on evolution by the IDist/creationists, the general public still recognize the importance of this revolutionary theory. They did an adequate treatment of Charles Darwin, but they introduced him as the Naturalist on the Beagle, when, in fact, he was merely the Captain's companion. I didn't really pay much attention to this segment, as it wasn't extremely interesting and I've heard the stories so many times.