physics and society

In class today, I said that the biggest impacts of physics on society have been (1) the Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, Newton understanding of celestial mechanics, and (2) the development of the atomic bomb. The former was the beginning of precise, quantitative science (I think), undermining the authority of non-empirical scholarship in areas of natural philosophy, and establishing calculus and quantitative observation as the key tools of physics. The latter created an ability to (trivially and unilaterally) destroy ourselves and pushed all of world politics to global mutual destruction brinksmanship. After these two I might put the discoveries of AC and DC electricity (and batteries and the like), and the optimization of steam engines (and the discovery of thermodynamics and the like).