Who is your favourite scientist of all time?

For me it will have to Einstein, if you ever took physics at uni and attended classes on his theory's you'd soon realise that his brain was practically God like!
 
As the OP asked for my favourite, as opposed to who I think made the greatest contributions:

Eratosthenes. More than 2200 years ago, he deduced ways to calculate the size of the Earth, the distance from the Earth to the sun and the distance from the Earth to the moon, without any equipment more advanced than sticks. He did a great deal else beside, as he was a remarkable polymath, but those really strike a chord with me. The methods he created are correct. His results might not have been accurate, but any inaccuracies were due to measuring errors. Eyeballs and sticks are not the right things to get very accurate measurements with.

More than 2200 years ago. With sticks. Awesome.

Mary Somerville. 18th century Britain wasn't exactly noted for encouraging women to study maths and sciences (her parents were very worried because they genuinely thought it was highly dangerous for her health), but she had determination and money so she studied them anyway. Along with Latin and ancient Greek, mainly so she could read classical texts in the original languages because she wanted to. A favourite of mine because her experiences show that (a) sex and gender in history is far more complex than the simplistic feminist revisionism we're all taught and (b) other scientists and mathematicians were doing it right. She was accepted as a peer without any fuss because she was - they based their conclusions on the evidence, as any scientist should.

Sir Patrick Moore. He was the first person I saw on TV who showed such unbridled enthusiasm. Science as something so fascinating that there isn't enough time to talk about it at normal speed because there's so much wonderful stuff to talk about :) A great lesson for a child.
 
Angilion said:
As the OP asked for my favourite, as opposed to who I think made the greatest contributions:

Eratosthenes. More than 2200 years ago, he deduced ways to calculate the size of the Earth, the distance from the Earth to the sun and the distance from the Earth to the moon, without any equipment more advanced than sticks. He did a great deal else beside, as he was a remarkable polymath, but those really strike a chord with me. The methods he created are correct. His results might not have been accurate, but any inaccuracies were due to measuring errors. Eyeballs and sticks are not the right things to get very accurate measurements with.

More than 2200 years ago. With sticks. Awesome.
Click to expand...
Superb choice. I was considering another post with Eratosthenes. Like you said, the calculations he made, with the precision he achieved, in the time in which he lived... Just incredible. It makes one yearn, more than ever, for the oppourtunity to delve into the depths of the library of Alexandria. :p
 
I would like to say Newton, but I will have to go with Darwin because of his theory on evolution and natural selection.

Evolution because I think where we came from is very important (none of that religion crap thanks!).
Natural selection because a chav walking along a train track, well. pretty much deserves to die. The same goes for walking across the road without looking.
 
I think that I will add to my earlier post, as a pure scientist, then I would say that Feynman is truely the one that I got the most from, however, in terms of television, in the 80s I would have said Heinz Wolff, but currently, I'm inclined to say Jim Al-Khalili
 
A difficult one but if forced to choose between Newton, Galileo and da Vinci then I'll go with Isaac Newton.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom