Top Scientists, from Simmons The Scientific 100

The Top Twenty-Five

1. Issac Newton and the Newtonian Revolution
2. Albert Einstein and Twentieth-Century Science
3. Neils Bohr and the Atom
4. Charles Darwin and Evolution
5. Louis Pasteur and the Germ Theory of Disease
6. Sigmund Freud and Psychology of the Unconscious
7. Galileo Galilei and the New Science
   
8. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier and the Revolution in Chemistry
9. Johannes Kepler and Motion of the Planets
10. Nicolaus Copernicus and the Heliocentric Universe
11. Michael Faraday and the Classical Field Theory
12. James Clerk Maxwell and the Electromagnetic Field
13. Claude Bernard and the Founding of Modern Physiology
14. Franz Boas and Modern Anthropology
15. Werner Heisenberg and Quantum Theory
16. Linus Pauling and Twentieth-Century Chemistry
17. Rudolf Virchow and the Cell Doctrine
18. Erwin Schrodinger and Wave Mechanics
    
19. Ernest Rutherford and the Structure of the Atom
20. Paul Dirac and Quantum Electrodynamics
21. Andreas Vesalius and the New Anatomy
22. Tycho Brahe and the New Astronomy
23. Comte de Buffon and l'Histoire Naturelle
24. Ludwig Boltzmann and Thermodynamics
25. Max Plank and the Quanta
26. Marie Curie and Radioactivity

From John Simmons, The Scientific 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Scientists, Past and Present (Secaucus NJ, Citadel Press, 1996)

Suggested Science Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin

--Hard To Be a God by Strugatski Brothers
--Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick
--Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch
--The Invincible by Stanislaw Lem
--The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe
--The Dream Master by Roger Zelazny
--The Exile Waiting by Vonda N. McIntyre
--And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees by Michael Bishop
--The Non-Existent Knight by Italo Calvino
--The Cloven Viscount by Italo Calvino
--The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino

As told by Kim Stanley Robinson in an untitled chapter in 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin edited by Karen Joy Fowler and Debbie Notkin (Seattle, Aqueduct Press, 2010)