The recent passing of Gerhard Herzberg made me ponder.
Science is a human endeavor, possibly the greatest one of all.
The following are my suggestions of those persons who made major contributions. Of course, it s not complete, neither in the selection of names nor the advances that each person contributed. The list may never be complete, given the nature of science. The following list is in alphabetical order. Though limited and replaced by quantum mechanics, it proposed that angular momentum was quantized, a central concept in modern quantum mechanics.