Time Picks Century's `Great Minds' By CHELSEA J. CARTER .c The Associated Press NEW YORK (AP) -- The Wright brothers, whose flying machine made the world a smaller place, and Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity expanded our view of the universe, are among Time magazine's picks as the 20th century's greatest minds. Time singled out 24 men and women responsible for scientific breakthroughs, inventions and innovations that led to such things as the atomic bomb, the airplane, television and the World Wide Web. Einstein was the greatest theorist, said the magazine which hits newsstands Monday. Einstein ``discovered, just by thinking about it, the essential nature of the universe,'' it said. Among others on the list, the Wright brothers combined Leonardo da Vinci's vision of a flying machine with modern science to take man into the air with powered flight, Time said. It's the fourth in a series of six issues profiling the 100 most influential people of the century. ``Often it was hard to pick one person to credit for a particular advance,'' wrote Walter Isaacson, Time's managing editor. Some cases, for example, involved rivalries such as the competition between Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin to invent the television. The magazine picked Farnsworth. And out of the battle between Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin to invent the polio vaccine, the magazine chose Salk. Time's great minds list also includes chemist Leo Baekeland, who helped found the modern plastics industry by developing Bakelite; Tim Berners-Lee, the pioneer of the World Wide Web on the Internet; environmental activist Rachel Carson; atomic physicist Enrico Fermi; bacteriologist Alexander Fleming; psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and rocket scientist Robert Goddard. Also chosen were mathematician Kurt Godel; Edwin Hubble, who discovered the first hints that the universe began with the Big Bang; economist John Maynard Keynes; anthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey and their anthropologist son Richard; child psychologist Jean Piaget; transistor developer William Shockley; computer scientist Alan Turing; James Watson and Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA; and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Because so few women have been named to Time's lists -- two in this latest group -- a Radcliffe College professor formed a group to choose the most influential women. ``It came about because we were all complaining about the Time magazine list,'' said Rite Nakashima Brock, director of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe. The selections were made by Time editors in consultation with CBS News, public figures, academics, journalists, political analysts and others.
