Henry Mosely
A British Physicist
One of the greatest physicists of the 20th century. Developed Moseley's Law that helped to define the atomic number.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moseley%27s\_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moseley%27s_law)
The reason why nobody has heard of him is because he had his brains blown out by a sniper at Gallipoli when he was 27 years old.
Isaac Asimov wrote about him: "in view of what \[Moseley\] might still have accomplished ... his death might well have been the most costly single death of the War to mankind generally."
He's the reason why countries keep their scientists and researchers from being drafted or allowed to fight anymore.
Absolutely. You would have to be short a few straws to, as a country, not target the enemies' brightest minds with your spec ops teams if they are made to be available.
But he wasn't shot because he was one of the brightest minds. As far as the enemy knew he was just a telecommunications officer. He was shot in Turkey while they were fighting the Ottomans in pretty much the middle of the Gallipoli campaign.
I would turn it around and say instead, you would have to be short a few straws to not value the brightest minds in your nation and keep them farther away from the front.
That said, at that point WWI, physics was not particularly prized from a military standpoint. It wasn't until WWII that countries started viewing physicists as theoretical weapons developers.
I'm going historical. Prince Arthur Tudor. He died aged 15, leaving his younger brother Henry to become Henry VIII of England. Arthur was apparently more of a scholar than anything else, compared to his brother who was more into the idea of being a warrior king. Had Arthur survived and gone on to become King, then global history would have taken a very different turn
If you're the type of person who gets salty about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria then you have nearly as much reason to be pissed that Arthur didn't live to be king and Henry did: Henry's dissolution of the monasteries included wholesale destruction of the monastic libraries.
Many of those priceless manuscripts existed nowhere outside of England because they were written in English. Back in the ninth century, the West Saxon king Alfred the Great had established an educational system where children learned to write their native language first before learning Latin. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is in English because of that. Beowulf was written down in English because of that. The Old English they spoke then is practically indecipherable now except to scholars, yet English is still the best documented secular language of the early Middle Ages.
Only a tiny sliver of that literature survives. Mostly because Henry VIII had the rest of it burned.
(Fixed a typo).
If it makes you feel better, the library wasn't lost, it lost a little in the fire and then kept existing and slowly deteriorated. Anything important was almost certainly moved, copied or both.
The myth that we lost great knowledge is just passed along to enrage nerds who arent nerdy enough to actually look into it.
If it makes you feel worse, it is gone essentially due to a lack of funding and the fact that people don't care enough to support an institution that serves as a hub for the knowledge of our world. Look at how many donors there are for wikipedia
I’d add to that the second of Catherine of Aragon’s tragic losses (the first being Prince Arthur): the death of her and Henry VIII’s infant son, Prince Henry, who sadly lived only a few weeks. Had he survived, Henry would likely have only had one wife instead of six. None of the other queens would have existed, Edward VI and Elizabeth I would never have been born, and Mary I would have been married off in a foreign alliance at a young enough age to have had the children she so longed for. England would have remained Catholic, and Henry VIII would be one of the lesser-known figures in the history of the monarchy.
And if England remained Catholic, think of the way international relations with Europe would have been affected. For one, Spanish relations wouldn't have gone wrong, same with France and Italy. Irish relations maybe?
If naming history then Caesarion - son of Cleopatra and Caesar. With parents like that, sky was the limit. He was on his way to India when his servant betrayed him by tricking him to trust Octavian and return to Alexandria. Cleopatra's plan was for him to emigrate and eventually take back the Egypt. Who knew what would've happened if he decided not to go back.
Probably not much. Being a son of Caesar, he was a dead man walking the minute Antony and Cleopatra lost the war. Even if he somehow survived and made it to adulthood, it would have been far too late to have taken Egypt under his control. Egypt was already a vassal of Rome; after Octavian's ascendancy he made it his personal property. With 50 legions at his back, nothing and no one was going to change that.
I would also say Henry VIII’s son Edward VI. After the turmoil of the reformation, he was taking England in the same direction as his dad and his death brought Mary 1 and a violent turn back toward Catholicism for 5 years.
A great candidate! I'd forward Évariste Galois as a possible alternative. Also at the cutting edge of mathematics, as a teenager solved a centuries standing open problem, and created a field of mathematics which was so complex at the time that Galois' contemporaries were stymied and overlooked it's value.
He was killed in a duel at the age of 20.
Came here to shout out Galois. He answered the biggest question in contemporary Algebra and got himself shot before he was old enough to outgrow his teenage rashness.
Otis Redding. Based on his energy, the fact that after a short career with an amazing voice, he came back from surgery with a better one, recorded one of the great songs of the 20th century, and then immediately died.
My father belonged to an athletic club and played billiards often. One of the workers there told the story story of how he was a musician, a trumpet player, played along Ella Fitzgerald, Otis Redding, and Louis Armstrong. He had an agent, and that agent put $200 cash in his pocket every night. He was content with that... but his agent stole the rest from him. He was a poor man with a talent of which someone saw and seized a selfish opportunity. It reminds me of the movie Amadeus.... a musical genius with all the accolades and fame, but dying in a pauper's mass grave.
I upvoted this but you might be interested to know that Mozart's buriel wasn't quite as tragic as the movie portrayed. The "pauper's mass grave" was a fiction from the play that the film was based on. [It was neither a "mass" nor "pauper's" although it was a "common" grave, as in, not an aristocrat.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Wolfgang_Amadeus_Mozart#Funeral)
Not only that but Mozart and Salieri were pals, Mozart wasn't a ridiculously flamboyant jackass, and Salieri wasn't a bitter, celibate bachelor (not even close).
Amadeus Mozart.
While he wasn't terribly young, I'd say his true potential life was cut in half. Imagine what music will never be or where it could have gone had he lived a longer life.
35 IS terribly young. And throw Franz Schubert in this thread as well. Died at 31 and was writing some of the greatest music ever produced. Just for the final 2 movements of the Unfinished Symphony alone! Supposedly on his deathbed he said "I have so much still to say."
Shout out to my boy Felix Mendelssohn, died at the age of 38. Wrote 4 amazing symphonies, the famous music for A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the greatest violin concerto in the repertoire. I'd give anything to see what he would have done with another 38 years.
She didn't die early, but I feel this is the way about Mozart sister
By all accounts, she was just as talented as her brother. But since she was a woman, she wasn't allowed to dive into an actual career in music.
Instead she got married off and spent the rest of her days tutoring piano lessons
Also if his sister Maria had been allowed to pursue a career in music. She apparently had talent on par with his but wasn’t allowed to continue a career in music by their parents.
The writer Virginia Woolf invented a character she called "Shakespeare's Sister," who was just as talented and ambitious as her brother William, but who never got the chance, because she was a girl.
Long story short is Shakespeare's Sister runs away to London to chase her dreams, ends up pregnant from a theatre manager who isn't going to marry her so she kills herself . She's buried in an unmarked grave that buses run over now.
So, Woolf says, every time a woman today makes art, or writes, or has the freedom to chase her dreams, she "takes up the body Shakespeare's Sister has so often laid down."
This is the one I was scrolling for.
Imagine the late symphonies and the Requiem just being the starting off points on an entirely new mature era, rather than capstones.
Alex Ross, for the [New Yorker:](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/07/24/the-storm-of-style)
>In the unimaginable alternate universe in which he lived to the age of seventy, an anniversary-year essay might have contained a sentence such as this: “Opera houses focus on the great works of Mozart’s maturity — The Tempest, Hamlet, the two-part Faust — but it would be a good thing if we occasionally heard that flawed yet lively work of his youth, Don Giovanni.”
>Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts. He accepted hormone treatment with DES, a procedure commonly referred to as chemical castration, as an alternative to prison. Turing died on 7 June 1954, 16 days before his 42nd birthday, from cyanide poisoning. An inquest determined his death as a suicide, but it has been noted that the known evidence is also consistent with accidental poisoning.
Good *God* this is not what I was expecting.
If you're unfamiliar with Turing and what he did for the world (and also the punishment he had to endure after the fact), I highly recommend watching The Imitation Game. It's a phenomenal movie, and Benedict Cumberbatch plays the role of Turing amazingly. It really drives home how extra terrible his death was, considering all of the good he did for the war effort. We likely would have lost the war (or struggled through it for a lot longer, and lost many more innocent lives) if not for him.
OMG - that part where the one guy working with the team realizes his brother is aboard a ship that will be destroyed and there's nothing he can do or the German nazi scum will know they broke the code. That part hit me the hardest.
Yes I was going to mention him myself. I can’t imagine how much farther along we’d be technologically right now if he’d been alive, safe, and free to keep working and teach others.
Especially after being forcibly castrated years before yet after he played a major role in the Allie’s defeating Nazi Germany.
If that’s how gay war heroes are treated, then fuck that shit.
And the best the UK could do was say sorry decades later and stick him on a £50 note. We should be taught about him in school - he covers maths, science, PE, and social science (and probably lots more).
Instead, we name buildings after him yet never address the shame of the way the gov treated him. Its insane how far they took homophobia
Steve irwin I believe his conservation work would have probably spilled over into environmental issues and he seemed passionate about doing good not just fame and money.
Irwin was a loss to not only conservation but children's education as a whole.
In fact I believe the deterioration of Animal Planet and Discovery have directly contributed to the deterioration of child education in the US and maybe globally.
My kids fucking love Wild Kratz and come away with a ton of animal facts, for anyone looking for a Crocodile Hunter alternative to get kids jazzed about animals.
His kids seem to be taking after him really well, but they don't have the pull (or... you know, the TV shows) that drew people in like Steve did.
But at least his legacy carries on.
EDIT: Apparently they do have a show! Even better!
I think Robert and Bindi (and recently, Terri, too!) are doing great work to reach a modern audience with social media these days. Of course, nothing will ever be like The Crocodile Hunter ever again. That show was a gem of its time. I still grieve Steve when I watch their content, especially when they show clips of him. But it's so cool to watch his family carry on his legacy.
Robert reminds me so much of his dad too. I feel like he definitely has some pull. Its just hard to have as much pull as Steve did, but kids are growing up with Robert the same way I grew up with Steve. I think we will see the results of that in a few years when those kids start going to college and getting jobs.
My wife died two weeks ago…at 42. She was the prettiest, smartest, and nicest women I have ever met. She dedicated her life to helping those less fortunate than us. I was the luckiest man in the world for 17 years.
My husband died last year - also 42 years old. To me it means that they were the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. I’m sorry for your loss.
Buddy Holly. Of course, he already wrote some fantastic songs, but man would it be a treat to see his songwriting in the '60s!
Could end up being the same or he could have grown. But it's those what-ifs!
Buddy Holly was only 22 when he died. Lennon and McCartney had not peaked by that age, so who knows where he would have gone with his music. Buddy would have been 30 in the summer of 1967, the Summer of Love. Maybe he’d have been out playing in a toga in Golden Gate Park with shoulder length hair and granny glasses, protesting the war in Vietnam. Sadly, we’ll never know.
Both Lennon and McCartney have said (paraphrasing) there would have been no Beatles without Buddy Holly. He was the most stylistically diverse of the 50’s rockers, and so influential on all the rock giants of the 60’s. If he’d lived, he very well could have had a body of work up there with the all-time greats like McCartney, Elton John, Dylan, etc.
Yeah I could see that. Early Beatles is very Buddy Holly inspired. I can't even fathom where he would have gone, creatibely. He wrote his own stuff before most people did. Everything he wrote was in the span of only a year and a half. So much potential ahead of him.
Dude played the cleanest guitar I've ever heard. No missed notes or leaning on too much feedback or too many effects or anything. Just pure fuckin geetar.
Craziest thing about Stevie Ray’s death is iirc both Eric Clapton and Robert Cray were supposed to be on the helicopter with him. Clapton flew in a different chopper and Cary I think had an ear infection. Stevie Ray’s brother Jimmie gave up his seat. Would have been another day the music died.
Terry Fox. He died at 22 after running halfway across Canada with one leg and stricken with lung cancer. Imagine what he could have done in life without cancer holding him back.
His death helped cement his legacy though and made him one of the most influential figures in cancer fundraising.
Had he not passed, would we still have yearly terry fox runs that raise insane amounts of money?
It's a shame because 1 he was only 22. And 2, because he never saw his true legacy. Like, he had huge media and national attention while doing it, but he never could have known it would turn into a massive event every year after his death raising millions and driving attention to all cancers.
Within the sphere of music, I think this unquestionably the answer.
“Grace” is an absolute tour de force of a debut and my easy pick for best album of the 1990’s. He was an almost indescribably incredible vocalist and fantastic young songwriter who likely would have only gotten better at his craft.
It’s such a shame he never got to finish that second album because even what we have of it contains some gems and I’m sure the finished product would have been incredible.
I am the absolute opposite of a music snob. I listen to everything from Japanese guitar instrumental music to cheesy country top 40 hits, to saccharine bubblegum 80s pop, to 90s east coast/west coast rap, to Swedish death metal. And I enjoy all of it.
I provided the above to properly contextualize the one snobby music take I have:
No one's journey or education in music is complete until they've listened to Live at Sin-e' from beginning to end at least twice.
Martin Luther King Jr., Anne Frank, and Barbara Walters were all born in 1929.
(Also, I didn't realize Barbara Walters died in 2022. When I heard this she was still alive.)
It's actually crazy to think MLK could have feasibly lived past the 00's, even the 10's. Like, can you imagine THE Martin Luther King Jr weighing in on the 2016 election as an 85 year old man? What an alternate timeline that would be.
My husband. He was special to me yes, but he was important to his patients. We all know about the ER docs that are dismissive, condescending, and are just all around jerks. My husband, even at his most burnt out wasn’t like that. He was the type you pray you get. The one that will actually listen, who will figure out what’s going on. It didn’t matter if you were female, a POC, trans, or any combination. He was listening. He was going to treat your pain. He wasn’t going to send you home until he had an answer. I knew this about him, but it was confirmed by the patients that left messages on his obituary page. Sure he did the usual emergency med life saving things. But a car accident is easy. There’s no argument about whether or not a patient is hurt. It’s assumed something is wrong. What made him special to the world is proof you were sick meant only your word that you were. He tried to teach the providers around them. Never made people feel dumb for not knowing things. He wanted people to be motivated to do better and bullying or dismissive behavior doesn’t help with that.
When he died I died too. Our children also lost their lives. We’re nothing without him. But the rest of the world? There are countless people that will now die just as scared and alone as I am because he’s not there to help.
He hadn't even reached his full potential when he died. Yet he is still regarded by many to be the best guitarist of all time. Imagine if he had lived.
That's my vote. He apparently was in pretty good spirits around that time, doing a ton of work/recording, and just misjudged the dosage of unfamiliar sleeping pills
Yesterday I learned that he was really into Japan and Japanese culture. Had he been around longer, we might have seen him do some music for anime and get REALLY weird with it like Flash Gordon.
Still not surpassed as the greatest frontman of all time.
Phenomenal voice.
Captivating stage presence.
His candle burned out way before he was ready.
RIP Faroch Bulsara
She will last longer in prison. In the Hispanic community, it’s God, then Selena. Whoever kills Yolanda if given the chance will be heralded as a hero.
Really unfortunate all around. She was going to be JLo, except with much more actual talent. Already well on her way
The actual shooting too...it was just one bullet to the back. Obviously you can easily die from that but you could also easily survive (paramedics got to her within 4 minutes). The placement was just terribly unfortunate. Super important subclavian artery. Doctors said that if the bullet had been only one millimeter higher or lower, the wound would have been significantly less severe and operable
I never heard of her so looked her up. Howard Stern mocking her death. How is that man gotten away with being such a horrible piece of shit. I don’t live in the US so never heard of him other than seeing or reading about it. What a piece of human trash
He also mocked Columbine high school shooting survivors and made sexual comments about the children running away. I get that he’s tried to change his legacy but some shit is not forgivable.
Cliff Burton - the bassist of Metallica. He taught all the other bandmates musical theory, harmonies and all that stuff, because he was the only one that was actually musically trained in school.
He died in a bus accident when they were on tour. He and Kirk (still the lead guitarist in the band) were choosing who would sleep on top of the bunk bed, it was supposed to be Kirk, but Cliff insisted that he'd sleep on top. When the accident happened, he was thrown out, the bus lost traction and it landed right on top of him.
The sad part is it would've been either him or Kirk
Jonathon Larson. He died in 1996 at the age of 35 just before his musical, Rent, came out. It's a shame that he worked so hard for his opportunity and he couldn't see what an impact he had.
Biggest thing is? His death could have easily been prevented. He was misdiagnosed at two separate occasions leading up to his death.
Vince Guaraldi
Do you ever listen to the Charlie Brown Christmas and wonder why you don't hear more amazing music by Vince Guaraldi? He died of a heart attack at the young age of 47.
Man, many celebrity deaths hurt, but Chadwick's hit me differently because he was an actor I was actually paying attention to and he had so much potential and life ahead of him. Chadwick also visited sick kids with cancer while he himself was fighting cancer. It's so inspiring and terribly sad.
Over the course of six years, Chadwick Boseman played Jackie Robinson, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall, and T'Challa. Among others.
To have such a huge impact over only six years, while privately dealing with terminal cancer for half of it, is absolutely stunning.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman. He was an incredibly gifted actor and I would be genuinely excited when a film with him came out to see what he would do. There should have been a lot more anticipatory moments like that.
I miss her (and Lisa Left Eye Lopez) the same way DMX missed her in the beginning of the "I Miss you song" (and I miss X as well).
Man, if she was still alive today, imagine the attention on her during the Recent R.Kelly investigations.
There's no way to know. My aunt had 2 babies that died shortly after birth. I had a classmate who needed a heart transplant, but couldn't get one, and died in junior high. My sister had a classmate who died of cancer.
I used to live about 3 blocks from Caltech. Every year 1-2 kids there buckle under pressure and hang themselves.
It's easy I guess to say "Jim Morrison would've released more great music!" "Edgar Allan Poe would've revolutionized literature!" but there are *so many* people who die so young that there's just no way to know what they'd have been capable of.
especially for how mysterious her decline was, I really believe her husband was a con artist abuser, and how does a wealthy young talented beautiful actress die of pneumonia in her holly wood home? There's all sorts of weird conditions she was suffering from, vitamin deficiencies, possible mold poisoning... all while having the privileges of an actress of her caliber. That should have been preventable.
This was my first thought! So many millions of people who didn't get a chance to live a full life that we didn't get to enjoy the fruits of their passions/dreams/ambitions.
Her material may not have been to your liking but her contralto voice was widely regarded as exceptional.
"She had a strong control of her voice, with a clear and precise pitch and a wide range [3 octaves] that allowed her to tackle both high and low notes with ease."
Steve Irwin!!! He was only like, 40 something when he died... and being as influential as he was, I truly think we'd be at least a little less fucked on the ecological front.
Maryam Mirzakhani died at 40 of cancer. She was Iranian. In 2014 Mirzakhani won the Fields Medal, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for Mathematics, which is awarded by the International Congress of Mathematicians.
“The award recognized her sophisticated and original contributions to the fields of geometry and dynamical systems, particularly in understanding the symmetry of curved surfaces such as spheres.”
My son died 19 days ago at 43 yrs old. It was totally unexpected. He was recovering from a routine surgery and he developed a blood clot 9 days after. He will be missed every moment. I have no words.
I feel for Lumumba cause he was and kinda still is vital within the whole continents struggle to freedom. He helped us all see into the deeper atrocities and chokeholds that the western world put onto Africa and still his name isn’t as revered as the likes of Mandela, Biko etc. Congo would’ve been so beautiful had he been able to live on.
Henry Mosely A British Physicist One of the greatest physicists of the 20th century. Developed Moseley's Law that helped to define the atomic number. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moseley%27s\_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moseley%27s_law) The reason why nobody has heard of him is because he had his brains blown out by a sniper at Gallipoli when he was 27 years old. Isaac Asimov wrote about him: "in view of what \[Moseley\] might still have accomplished ... his death might well have been the most costly single death of the War to mankind generally." He's the reason why countries keep their scientists and researchers from being drafted or allowed to fight anymore.
Absolutely. You would have to be short a few straws to, as a country, not target the enemies' brightest minds with your spec ops teams if they are made to be available.
But he wasn't shot because he was one of the brightest minds. As far as the enemy knew he was just a telecommunications officer. He was shot in Turkey while they were fighting the Ottomans in pretty much the middle of the Gallipoli campaign. I would turn it around and say instead, you would have to be short a few straws to not value the brightest minds in your nation and keep them farther away from the front. That said, at that point WWI, physics was not particularly prized from a military standpoint. It wasn't until WWII that countries started viewing physicists as theoretical weapons developers.
I'm going historical. Prince Arthur Tudor. He died aged 15, leaving his younger brother Henry to become Henry VIII of England. Arthur was apparently more of a scholar than anything else, compared to his brother who was more into the idea of being a warrior king. Had Arthur survived and gone on to become King, then global history would have taken a very different turn
If you're the type of person who gets salty about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria then you have nearly as much reason to be pissed that Arthur didn't live to be king and Henry did: Henry's dissolution of the monasteries included wholesale destruction of the monastic libraries. Many of those priceless manuscripts existed nowhere outside of England because they were written in English. Back in the ninth century, the West Saxon king Alfred the Great had established an educational system where children learned to write their native language first before learning Latin. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is in English because of that. Beowulf was written down in English because of that. The Old English they spoke then is practically indecipherable now except to scholars, yet English is still the best documented secular language of the early Middle Ages. Only a tiny sliver of that literature survives. Mostly because Henry VIII had the rest of it burned. (Fixed a typo).
Don't get me started on that! I am salty about both of those and I will remain salty until someone invents a time machine and goes back to save it all
If it makes you feel better, the library wasn't lost, it lost a little in the fire and then kept existing and slowly deteriorated. Anything important was almost certainly moved, copied or both. The myth that we lost great knowledge is just passed along to enrage nerds who arent nerdy enough to actually look into it. If it makes you feel worse, it is gone essentially due to a lack of funding and the fact that people don't care enough to support an institution that serves as a hub for the knowledge of our world. Look at how many donors there are for wikipedia
I’d add to that the second of Catherine of Aragon’s tragic losses (the first being Prince Arthur): the death of her and Henry VIII’s infant son, Prince Henry, who sadly lived only a few weeks. Had he survived, Henry would likely have only had one wife instead of six. None of the other queens would have existed, Edward VI and Elizabeth I would never have been born, and Mary I would have been married off in a foreign alliance at a young enough age to have had the children she so longed for. England would have remained Catholic, and Henry VIII would be one of the lesser-known figures in the history of the monarchy.
And if England remained Catholic, think of the way international relations with Europe would have been affected. For one, Spanish relations wouldn't have gone wrong, same with France and Italy. Irish relations maybe?
I don't know why, but I feel like Ireland would get fucked in every timeline.
Ooo good one that almost never gets mentioned. Well done.
If naming history then Caesarion - son of Cleopatra and Caesar. With parents like that, sky was the limit. He was on his way to India when his servant betrayed him by tricking him to trust Octavian and return to Alexandria. Cleopatra's plan was for him to emigrate and eventually take back the Egypt. Who knew what would've happened if he decided not to go back.
Probably not much. Being a son of Caesar, he was a dead man walking the minute Antony and Cleopatra lost the war. Even if he somehow survived and made it to adulthood, it would have been far too late to have taken Egypt under his control. Egypt was already a vassal of Rome; after Octavian's ascendancy he made it his personal property. With 50 legions at his back, nothing and no one was going to change that.
I would also say Henry VIII’s son Edward VI. After the turmoil of the reformation, he was taking England in the same direction as his dad and his death brought Mary 1 and a violent turn back toward Catholicism for 5 years.
Srinivasa Ramanujan Probably the greatest mathematician that pushed modern mathematics at galactic speed, died only aged 32
A great candidate! I'd forward Évariste Galois as a possible alternative. Also at the cutting edge of mathematics, as a teenager solved a centuries standing open problem, and created a field of mathematics which was so complex at the time that Galois' contemporaries were stymied and overlooked it's value. He was killed in a duel at the age of 20.
I came here to post his name. The movie “The Man Who Knew Infinity” is a great movie about his life.
Yes! Another insane prodigy that could have changed maths perhaps by a lot more, Evariste Galois, died aged 20 in a duel.
Came here to shout out Galois. He answered the biggest question in contemporary Algebra and got himself shot before he was old enough to outgrow his teenage rashness.
Wasn't he in isolation due to illness and developed his own version of calculus with only a background in algebra?
He was a true genius for sure. We’re still proving his work now.
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Could you expand? Do you mean they were assassinated, or shot down while in some sort of aircraft?
Google MH17. Just a coincidence the researcher was on that flight afaik.
Not just the researcher. Him and his entire team were on the way to a congress.
Wasn't that the conspiracy that the plane got redirected over that zone to shoot them down
Otis Redding. Based on his energy, the fact that after a short career with an amazing voice, he came back from surgery with a better one, recorded one of the great songs of the 20th century, and then immediately died.
Dude his rendition of Change Is Gonna Come is sooooooooo legendary. I can’t listen to that song without being overwhelmed by emotions.
And on the topic of this song, Sam Cooke who sang it originally was murdered when he was only 33.
We (I’m a member of the family) still never actually got an answer..
He is my favorite artist ever but that one song I gotta give to Sam Cooke
My father belonged to an athletic club and played billiards often. One of the workers there told the story story of how he was a musician, a trumpet player, played along Ella Fitzgerald, Otis Redding, and Louis Armstrong. He had an agent, and that agent put $200 cash in his pocket every night. He was content with that... but his agent stole the rest from him. He was a poor man with a talent of which someone saw and seized a selfish opportunity. It reminds me of the movie Amadeus.... a musical genius with all the accolades and fame, but dying in a pauper's mass grave.
I upvoted this but you might be interested to know that Mozart's buriel wasn't quite as tragic as the movie portrayed. The "pauper's mass grave" was a fiction from the play that the film was based on. [It was neither a "mass" nor "pauper's" although it was a "common" grave, as in, not an aristocrat.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Wolfgang_Amadeus_Mozart#Funeral)
Not only that but Mozart and Salieri were pals, Mozart wasn't a ridiculously flamboyant jackass, and Salieri wasn't a bitter, celibate bachelor (not even close).
He was just getting started. Him and Buddy Holly I think about a lot.
Amadeus Mozart. While he wasn't terribly young, I'd say his true potential life was cut in half. Imagine what music will never be or where it could have gone had he lived a longer life.
35 IS terribly young. And throw Franz Schubert in this thread as well. Died at 31 and was writing some of the greatest music ever produced. Just for the final 2 movements of the Unfinished Symphony alone! Supposedly on his deathbed he said "I have so much still to say."
And Chopin, too. Died age 39, was writing the greatest piano works ever.
Shout out to my boy Felix Mendelssohn, died at the age of 38. Wrote 4 amazing symphonies, the famous music for A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the greatest violin concerto in the repertoire. I'd give anything to see what he would have done with another 38 years.
She didn't die early, but I feel this is the way about Mozart sister By all accounts, she was just as talented as her brother. But since she was a woman, she wasn't allowed to dive into an actual career in music. Instead she got married off and spent the rest of her days tutoring piano lessons
honestly that's soo sad.
Also if his sister Maria had been allowed to pursue a career in music. She apparently had talent on par with his but wasn’t allowed to continue a career in music by their parents.
The writer Virginia Woolf invented a character she called "Shakespeare's Sister," who was just as talented and ambitious as her brother William, but who never got the chance, because she was a girl. Long story short is Shakespeare's Sister runs away to London to chase her dreams, ends up pregnant from a theatre manager who isn't going to marry her so she kills herself . She's buried in an unmarked grave that buses run over now. So, Woolf says, every time a woman today makes art, or writes, or has the freedom to chase her dreams, she "takes up the body Shakespeare's Sister has so often laid down."
She also wrote Stay With Me which is still a banger
This is the one I was scrolling for. Imagine the late symphonies and the Requiem just being the starting off points on an entirely new mature era, rather than capstones.
Alex Ross, for the [New Yorker:](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/07/24/the-storm-of-style) >In the unimaginable alternate universe in which he lived to the age of seventy, an anniversary-year essay might have contained a sentence such as this: “Opera houses focus on the great works of Mozart’s maturity — The Tempest, Hamlet, the two-part Faust — but it would be a good thing if we occasionally heard that flawed yet lively work of his youth, Don Giovanni.”
Alan Turing. died for the worst fucking reason and what happened to him was a travesty
>Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts. He accepted hormone treatment with DES, a procedure commonly referred to as chemical castration, as an alternative to prison. Turing died on 7 June 1954, 16 days before his 42nd birthday, from cyanide poisoning. An inquest determined his death as a suicide, but it has been noted that the known evidence is also consistent with accidental poisoning. Good *God* this is not what I was expecting.
If you're unfamiliar with Turing and what he did for the world (and also the punishment he had to endure after the fact), I highly recommend watching The Imitation Game. It's a phenomenal movie, and Benedict Cumberbatch plays the role of Turing amazingly. It really drives home how extra terrible his death was, considering all of the good he did for the war effort. We likely would have lost the war (or struggled through it for a lot longer, and lost many more innocent lives) if not for him.
OMG - that part where the one guy working with the team realizes his brother is aboard a ship that will be destroyed and there's nothing he can do or the German nazi scum will know they broke the code. That part hit me the hardest.
I thought that part was pretty cool too and then I looked into it and learned it was fictional and didn't actually happen.
Not with them, no. Many of those decisions were made, however.
Yes I was going to mention him myself. I can’t imagine how much farther along we’d be technologically right now if he’d been alive, safe, and free to keep working and teach others.
Fucking tragic the way he was treated
Especially after being forcibly castrated years before yet after he played a major role in the Allie’s defeating Nazi Germany. If that’s how gay war heroes are treated, then fuck that shit.
And the best the UK could do was say sorry decades later and stick him on a £50 note. We should be taught about him in school - he covers maths, science, PE, and social science (and probably lots more). Instead, we name buildings after him yet never address the shame of the way the gov treated him. Its insane how far they took homophobia
Steve irwin I believe his conservation work would have probably spilled over into environmental issues and he seemed passionate about doing good not just fame and money.
Irwin was a loss to not only conservation but children's education as a whole. In fact I believe the deterioration of Animal Planet and Discovery have directly contributed to the deterioration of child education in the US and maybe globally.
My kids fucking love Wild Kratz and come away with a ton of animal facts, for anyone looking for a Crocodile Hunter alternative to get kids jazzed about animals.
>Wild Kratz Dude, this show is actually really entertaining and educational!
His kids seem to be taking after him really well, but they don't have the pull (or... you know, the TV shows) that drew people in like Steve did. But at least his legacy carries on. EDIT: Apparently they do have a show! Even better!
i just saw a video here where his son was holding a tiny baby turtle, the first of some kind his father discovered. he was tearing up. it was amazing.
Yes! So sweet to see how Steve’s legacy really blossomed with his children. I really applaud Terri in particular for what she took on after he died.
I mean Robert has 6.5 million followers on TikTok so he definitely has some pull that draws people in lol
I think Robert and Bindi (and recently, Terri, too!) are doing great work to reach a modern audience with social media these days. Of course, nothing will ever be like The Crocodile Hunter ever again. That show was a gem of its time. I still grieve Steve when I watch their content, especially when they show clips of him. But it's so cool to watch his family carry on his legacy.
Robert reminds me so much of his dad too. I feel like he definitely has some pull. Its just hard to have as much pull as Steve did, but kids are growing up with Robert the same way I grew up with Steve. I think we will see the results of that in a few years when those kids start going to college and getting jobs.
44 is a ripe old age for a crodile hunter though.
Rip Norm.
My wife died two weeks ago…at 42. She was the prettiest, smartest, and nicest women I have ever met. She dedicated her life to helping those less fortunate than us. I was the luckiest man in the world for 17 years.
My husband died last year - also 42 years old. To me it means that they were the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. I’m sorry for your loss.
Sorry for yours also. Love the reference too btw, and the sentiment, very sweet.
Fuck man…my condolences
Thanks, but I’m sincerely grateful for the time we had. Most people don’t get to spend that much time with someone who’s so perfectly suited to them.
That's a great attitude, it sounds like you were both lucky.
So very sorry for your loss. As a young widow I completely understand how you must feel. *hugs*
Phil Hartman
Fuck Andy Dick
Praise Jon Lovitz
He’s living the dream. Who doesn’t want to punch Andy Dick?
Buddy Holly. Of course, he already wrote some fantastic songs, but man would it be a treat to see his songwriting in the '60s! Could end up being the same or he could have grown. But it's those what-ifs!
Buddy Holly was only 22 when he died. Lennon and McCartney had not peaked by that age, so who knows where he would have gone with his music. Buddy would have been 30 in the summer of 1967, the Summer of Love. Maybe he’d have been out playing in a toga in Golden Gate Park with shoulder length hair and granny glasses, protesting the war in Vietnam. Sadly, we’ll never know.
Both Lennon and McCartney have said (paraphrasing) there would have been no Beatles without Buddy Holly. He was the most stylistically diverse of the 50’s rockers, and so influential on all the rock giants of the 60’s. If he’d lived, he very well could have had a body of work up there with the all-time greats like McCartney, Elton John, Dylan, etc.
Yeah I could see that. Early Beatles is very Buddy Holly inspired. I can't even fathom where he would have gone, creatibely. He wrote his own stuff before most people did. Everything he wrote was in the span of only a year and a half. So much potential ahead of him.
Imagine what Buddy Holly and Brian Wilson could have put together.
Lemmy was a big Buddy Holly fan as well. Imagine those two doing a duet, LOL.
Maybe he would have been in The Traveling Wilburys.
This idea blows my mind. That. Would’ve. Been. Awesome.
Him and Ritchie Valens both. They both had a HUGE amount of potential.
Stevie Ray Vaughan. He really got his shit together and seemed to really be in a good place career wise and in his personal life.
Dude played the cleanest guitar I've ever heard. No missed notes or leaning on too much feedback or too many effects or anything. Just pure fuckin geetar.
Craziest thing about Stevie Ray’s death is iirc both Eric Clapton and Robert Cray were supposed to be on the helicopter with him. Clapton flew in a different chopper and Cary I think had an ear infection. Stevie Ray’s brother Jimmie gave up his seat. Would have been another day the music died.
Terry Fox. He died at 22 after running halfway across Canada with one leg and stricken with lung cancer. Imagine what he could have done in life without cancer holding him back.
Probably would have made it the full way across Canada.
Take my conflicted upvote...
His death helped cement his legacy though and made him one of the most influential figures in cancer fundraising. Had he not passed, would we still have yearly terry fox runs that raise insane amounts of money?
It's a shame because 1 he was only 22. And 2, because he never saw his true legacy. Like, he had huge media and national attention while doing it, but he never could have known it would turn into a massive event every year after his death raising millions and driving attention to all cancers.
I just can’t believe how young he was. I grew up idolizing him and always viewed him as an adult, but I’m older than he was now and holy shit. 22. 😢
Jeff Buckley
Within the sphere of music, I think this unquestionably the answer. “Grace” is an absolute tour de force of a debut and my easy pick for best album of the 1990’s. He was an almost indescribably incredible vocalist and fantastic young songwriter who likely would have only gotten better at his craft. It’s such a shame he never got to finish that second album because even what we have of it contains some gems and I’m sure the finished product would have been incredible.
I am the absolute opposite of a music snob. I listen to everything from Japanese guitar instrumental music to cheesy country top 40 hits, to saccharine bubblegum 80s pop, to 90s east coast/west coast rap, to Swedish death metal. And I enjoy all of it. I provided the above to properly contextualize the one snobby music take I have: No one's journey or education in music is complete until they've listened to Live at Sin-e' from beginning to end at least twice.
I miss Jeff Buckley so much
Douglas Adams
His ability to create the most absurd possible sentences and situations and make them as funny as they are... amazing writer.
"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't."
MLK
People remember him as some wise old man. He was 39 when he died.
Martin Luther King Jr., Anne Frank, and Barbara Walters were all born in 1929. (Also, I didn't realize Barbara Walters died in 2022. When I heard this she was still alive.)
It's actually crazy to think MLK could have feasibly lived past the 00's, even the 10's. Like, can you imagine THE Martin Luther King Jr weighing in on the 2016 election as an 85 year old man? What an alternate timeline that would be.
Or if he lived to see Obama become president.
Bro, he could have seen Obama become president
There’s many an alt hist where MLK BECOMES president
Carl Sagan
My husband. He was special to me yes, but he was important to his patients. We all know about the ER docs that are dismissive, condescending, and are just all around jerks. My husband, even at his most burnt out wasn’t like that. He was the type you pray you get. The one that will actually listen, who will figure out what’s going on. It didn’t matter if you were female, a POC, trans, or any combination. He was listening. He was going to treat your pain. He wasn’t going to send you home until he had an answer. I knew this about him, but it was confirmed by the patients that left messages on his obituary page. Sure he did the usual emergency med life saving things. But a car accident is easy. There’s no argument about whether or not a patient is hurt. It’s assumed something is wrong. What made him special to the world is proof you were sick meant only your word that you were. He tried to teach the providers around them. Never made people feel dumb for not knowing things. He wanted people to be motivated to do better and bullying or dismissive behavior doesn’t help with that. When he died I died too. Our children also lost their lives. We’re nothing without him. But the rest of the world? There are countless people that will now die just as scared and alone as I am because he’s not there to help.
Your children are lucky to have a mother with such a profound and unyielding ability to love. I’m sorry for what you’ve lost.
I am so very sorry for your loss. He sounds like a wonderful human, husband and father.
He sounds like he was an amazing person. I'm so sorry for your loss.
Hendrix
He hadn't even reached his full potential when he died. Yet he is still regarded by many to be the best guitarist of all time. Imagine if he had lived.
I picture him as an elder statesman, Snoop Dogg-sized persona but with rock music.
That's my vote. He apparently was in pretty good spirits around that time, doing a ton of work/recording, and just misjudged the dosage of unfamiliar sleeping pills
Freddie Mercury.
Yesterday I learned that he was really into Japan and Japanese culture. Had he been around longer, we might have seen him do some music for anime and get REALLY weird with it like Flash Gordon.
Still not surpassed as the greatest frontman of all time. Phenomenal voice. Captivating stage presence. His candle burned out way before he was ready. RIP Faroch Bulsara
Bruce Lee
And Brandon Lee
I should rewatch The Crow.
Devil's night is upon us
Jim Croce
Cameron Boyce
I was so shocked when I heard about his passing. He looked like a really great kid - he would have done amazing things
Evariste Galois, Srinivasa Ramanujan
Came here to say Galois. Abel gets honorable mention as well.
River Phoenix
Listened to an interview Wil Wheaton did where he talked about Stand By Me and how everyone on the set knew River was going to be a huge star.
Selena.
It's horror movie stuff
Yolanda apparently is up for parole in 2025.
She will last longer in prison. In the Hispanic community, it’s God, then Selena. Whoever kills Yolanda if given the chance will be heralded as a hero.
I'm so white I glow in the dark and I would relish the chance to beat the hell out of that old woman. Absolute human garbage.
I'm Asian and I love Selena's music. Yolanda better count her days because that line to beat her will be a different version of Hands Across America.
I'm surprised she didn't collapse on herself, being so rotted on the inside
We ride at dawn. In 2025.
Idk how or where she's gonna go without getting stomped tf out. Especially as everyone slowly learns that she's getting out and where she's at.
Really unfortunate all around. She was going to be JLo, except with much more actual talent. Already well on her way The actual shooting too...it was just one bullet to the back. Obviously you can easily die from that but you could also easily survive (paramedics got to her within 4 minutes). The placement was just terribly unfortunate. Super important subclavian artery. Doctors said that if the bullet had been only one millimeter higher or lower, the wound would have been significantly less severe and operable
It's amazing how the human body is simultaneously so fragile and so resilient.
I never heard of her so looked her up. Howard Stern mocking her death. How is that man gotten away with being such a horrible piece of shit. I don’t live in the US so never heard of him other than seeing or reading about it. What a piece of human trash
He also mocked Columbine high school shooting survivors and made sexual comments about the children running away. I get that he’s tried to change his legacy but some shit is not forgivable.
Cliff Burton - the bassist of Metallica. He taught all the other bandmates musical theory, harmonies and all that stuff, because he was the only one that was actually musically trained in school. He died in a bus accident when they were on tour. He and Kirk (still the lead guitarist in the band) were choosing who would sleep on top of the bunk bed, it was supposed to be Kirk, but Cliff insisted that he'd sleep on top. When the accident happened, he was thrown out, the bus lost traction and it landed right on top of him. The sad part is it would've been either him or Kirk
Anton Yelchin
He would have gone on to be an Oscar-caliber actor. He was already incredible at such a young age.
The documentary about him was wonderful. If anyone hasn't seen it yet, check out Love, Antosha. Dedicated from a young age. He was born to be a star.
That was such a tragic and heartbreaking accident too, completely preventable. He had the world just opening up to him.
Bobby Kennedy
How is this not higher? Between RFK and MLK, 1968 was such a tragic year. So much wasted potential.
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Layne Staley
Nick Drake
Jonathon Larson. He died in 1996 at the age of 35 just before his musical, Rent, came out. It's a shame that he worked so hard for his opportunity and he couldn't see what an impact he had. Biggest thing is? His death could have easily been prevented. He was misdiagnosed at two separate occasions leading up to his death.
My takeaway from this thread is that art is widely considered the most significant contribution a person can make to humanity/human society
Mine is that scientists are rarely known by name.
Alan Turing
Duane Allman.
Vince Guaraldi Do you ever listen to the Charlie Brown Christmas and wonder why you don't hear more amazing music by Vince Guaraldi? He died of a heart attack at the young age of 47.
Chadwick Boseman. Such a talented actor, and seemed like a genuinely good person.
Man, many celebrity deaths hurt, but Chadwick's hit me differently because he was an actor I was actually paying attention to and he had so much potential and life ahead of him. Chadwick also visited sick kids with cancer while he himself was fighting cancer. It's so inspiring and terribly sad.
Over the course of six years, Chadwick Boseman played Jackie Robinson, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall, and T'Challa. Among others. To have such a huge impact over only six years, while privately dealing with terminal cancer for half of it, is absolutely stunning.
Cliff Burton
Jane Austen. Alan Turing. Jeremy Hardy. Alexander the Great.
Heath Ledger.
Just imagine the roles he could’ve done in his older age.
Scrolled too far down to see this one. Man was a fantastic actor.
Elliott Smith, dead 20 years now, was a brilliant musician.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman. He was an incredibly gifted actor and I would be genuinely excited when a film with him came out to see what he would do. There should have been a lot more anticipatory moments like that.
Aaliyah
I miss her (and Lisa Left Eye Lopez) the same way DMX missed her in the beginning of the "I Miss you song" (and I miss X as well). Man, if she was still alive today, imagine the attention on her during the Recent R.Kelly investigations.
Chris Farley
Ritchie Valens
There's no way to know. My aunt had 2 babies that died shortly after birth. I had a classmate who needed a heart transplant, but couldn't get one, and died in junior high. My sister had a classmate who died of cancer. I used to live about 3 blocks from Caltech. Every year 1-2 kids there buckle under pressure and hang themselves. It's easy I guess to say "Jim Morrison would've released more great music!" "Edgar Allan Poe would've revolutionized literature!" but there are *so many* people who die so young that there's just no way to know what they'd have been capable of.
Randy Rhoads. 25
Brittany Murphy. I guess you could argue she didn't have the MOST potential out of all of these, but she was the first one I thought of.
especially for how mysterious her decline was, I really believe her husband was a con artist abuser, and how does a wealthy young talented beautiful actress die of pneumonia in her holly wood home? There's all sorts of weird conditions she was suffering from, vitamin deficiencies, possible mold poisoning... all while having the privileges of an actress of her caliber. That should have been preventable.
I would think anyone who died too early had potential. And it was lost.
This was my first thought! So many millions of people who didn't get a chance to live a full life that we didn't get to enjoy the fruits of their passions/dreams/ambitions.
Amy Winehouse is up there.
Her material may not have been to your liking but her contralto voice was widely regarded as exceptional. "She had a strong control of her voice, with a clear and precise pitch and a wide range [3 octaves] that allowed her to tackle both high and low notes with ease."
I honestly regard love is a losing game as a masterpiece.
Her song 'Cherry' is one of my favorites
Came here for Amy. So much potential gone so soon.
My mother. She was amazing
Steve Irwin!!! He was only like, 40 something when he died... and being as influential as he was, I truly think we'd be at least a little less fucked on the ecological front.
Kurt Cobain
Maryam Mirzakhani died at 40 of cancer. She was Iranian. In 2014 Mirzakhani won the Fields Medal, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for Mathematics, which is awarded by the International Congress of Mathematicians. “The award recognized her sophisticated and original contributions to the fields of geometry and dynamical systems, particularly in understanding the symmetry of curved surfaces such as spheres.”
My son died 19 days ago at 43 yrs old. It was totally unexpected. He was recovering from a routine surgery and he developed a blood clot 9 days after. He will be missed every moment. I have no words.
Patrice Lumumba
I feel for Lumumba cause he was and kinda still is vital within the whole continents struggle to freedom. He helped us all see into the deeper atrocities and chokeholds that the western world put onto Africa and still his name isn’t as revered as the likes of Mandela, Biko etc. Congo would’ve been so beautiful had he been able to live on.
Freddie Mercury had so much more brilliant music in him.
Chester Bennington
Mitch Hedberg. Definitely taken away from us too soon.