[myrmidon]

> I found the MBA.

Nope, thats a false positive.

Also cutting the quote there heavily twists the meaning: I'm not saying those scientists were replaceable as persons, just that their effect on all of humanities scientific progress was.

Many persons have a strong notion that we owe certain discoveries to a specific person, but this does not even hold up to cursory examination in my view (those discoveries would have been made in short order by someone else).

I'm very curious though if you have counterexamples, or think the premise is otherwise flawed.

[avmich]

> I'm very curious though if you have counterexamples, or think the premise is otherwise flawed.

I suspect we can find counterexamples if look enough, though to truly present some a serious knowledge of science history is needed.

What do you think of contributions of Srinivasa Ramanujan and George Cantor?

[myrmidon]

I think some of Ramanujans results might have come significantly (more than a decade!) later without him, but I don't think that this would have held up mathematics as a field significantly.

For Cantor, I think the maximum delay in results would've been even less, but maybe the impact (=> set theory) bigger during that time?

I will concede that there is a lot of value that any specific scientist provides just from correspondence/communication alone which is very hard to quantify.

I also think if you took away whole institutions from a hypothetical timeline, like, e.g. the University of Göttingen, then the impact could be quite clear (more than just a decade of lost progress in some field). So maybe you could argue that some founders of prodigious institutions helped human science more than any single scientist? But this is highly hypothetical (if the people AT those institutions would have existed regardless). Also a distasteful thought (to me).