the 22 Greatest Scientific Breakthroughs of the 20th century

In his new book, "The Discoveries," novelist and physicist Alan Lightman offers his list of the 22 greatest scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century, devoting a chapter to each and reprinting the scientific papers in which they were presented. The list of 22 is provided here by the Boston Globe:

1. THE QUANTUM - Max Planck (1900)
2. HORMONES - William Bayliss and Ernest Starling (1902)
3. THE PARTICLE NATURE OF LIGHT - Albert Einstein (1905)
4. SPECIAL RELATIVITY - Albert Einstein (1905)
5. THE NUCLEUS OF THE ATOM - Ernest Rutherford (1911)
6. THE SIZE OF THE COSMOS - Henrietta Leavitt (1912)
7. THE ARRANGEMENT OF ATOMS IN SOLID MATTER - W. Friedrich, P. Knipping, and M. von Laue (1912)
8. THE QUANTUM ATOM - Niels Bohr (1913)
9. THE MEANS OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN NERVES - Otto Loewi (1921)
10. THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE - Werner Heisenberg (1927)
11. THE CHEMICAL BOND - Linus Pauling (1928)
12. THE EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE - Edwin Hubble (1929)
13. ANTIBIOTICS - Alexander Fleming (1929)
14. THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION OF ENERGY IN LIVING ORGANISMS - Hans Krebs and W. A. Johnson (1937)
15. NUCLEAR FISSION - Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann (1939); and Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch (1939)
16. THE MOVABILITY OF GENES - Barbara McClintock (1948)
17. THE STRUCTURE OF DNA - James D. Watson and Francis H. C. Crick (1953); and Rosalind E. Franklin and R. G. Gosling (1953)
18. THE STRUCTURE OF PROTEINS - Max F. Perutz, M. G. Rossmann, Ann F. Cullis, Hilary Muirhead, Georg Will, and A. C. T. North (1960)
19. RADIO WAVES FROM THE BIG BANG - Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson (1965); and Robert H. Dicke, P. James E. Peebles, Peter G. Roll, and David T. Wilkinson (1965)
20. A UNIFIED THEORY OF FORCES - Steven Weinberg (1967)
21. QUARKS - M. Breidenbach, J. I. Friedman, H. W. Kendall, E. D. Bloom, D. H. Coward, H. DeStaebler, J. Drees, L. W. Mo, and R. E. Taylor (1969)
22. THE CREATION OF ALTERED FORMS OF LIFE - David A. Jackson, Robert H. Symons, and Paul Berg (1972)

So... what are the odds we manage to teach all of this stuff to our children before awarding them diplomas? I may have found a specific goal for this year's classes...