• Question: Who do you think the most influential scientist of the past century is?

    Asked by to Becky, Clara, Daniel, Simon, Thomas on 14 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Thomas Elias Cocolios

      Thomas Elias Cocolios answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      Most definitely Ernest Rutherford. Naturally, as a former student from McGill University (where he discovered the exponential law of alpha decay, for which he eventually got the Nobel Prize) and a current researcher at The University of Manchester (where he discovered the nucleus with the gold foil experiment), I cannot give any other answer!
      Beyond his passion and determination, Rutherford was also a great visionary and a great leader. During WWI, he contributed actively to the development of the radar and was instrumental in the success of the war effort. He also allegedly refused a second Nobel Prize, insisting that the Nobel committee should rather support a rising star (e.g. Marie Curie) rather than an old established professor: beyond being brilliant and a hero, he was also a gentleman.
      He left quite big shoes to fill!

    • Photo: Clara Nellist

      Clara Nellist answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      Wow, a tough question! It’s hard to only pick one, so I’m going to cheat and give you two answers depending on what you mean by influential :).

      If you mean a scientists whose work has had the most impact, then I think I’ll go with Tim Berners-Lee, an English computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web while he was working at CERN. The WWW is how computers talk to each other over the internet and I think you’ll agree that it’s had a huge influence on the lives of so many people over the planet. It’s allowing us to have this discussion right now!

      But for a scientist who influenced others, I’m going to choose Carl Sagan. He was a brilliant science communicator and one of his books (Contact) is actually one of the reasons I started thinking of becoming a scientist when I was younger.

    • Photo: Daniel Roach

      Daniel Roach answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      I’d have to go with Paul Dirac – he was a contemporary of Einstein, and a real mathematical physicist’s mathematical physicist.

      An intense, quiet and mega-skilled physicist, he helped set the groundwork for modern quantum theory – the Dirac equation predicted anti-matter (it gives solutions with negative energies), and was so elegant, yet powerful that Dirac himself was doubtful of it! An amazing mind, a dignified gentleman and real ‘boffin’:)

    • Photo: Simon Albright

      Simon Albright answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      For me that’s really hard to answer.

      We have the likes of Niels Bohr, Ernest Rutherford and Erwin Schroedinger (amongst many others) to thank for Quantum Mechanics. Without QM the computers we’re using to have these conversations couldn’t exist! QM is one of the most amazing theories ever developed, it’s remarkably accurate and tells us so much, from why a glowing poker is the particular colour it is to how lasers, computer chips and atomic nuclei work.

      But then Albert Einstein gave us Relativity which we need for our SatNavs and particle accelerators (did you know the microwave in your kitchen is a particle accelerator?).

      And of course without James Clerk Maxwell we wouldn’t have anything like the understanding of electro-magnetism that we do and we use that to communicate over vast distances, and even into space, with radio waves.

      And who cannot forget Marie Curie who discovered radiation, or Nikola Tesla without whom we wouldn’t have the electricity grid we do, or Richard Feynman who gave us Feynman diagrams which make understanding particle physics far easier.

      And those are just the ones off the top of my head!!! There’s no way I can pick just one, I’ll say me, I influence me a lot.

    • Photo: Becky Martin

      Becky Martin answered on 17 Mar 2014:

      That’s a difficult one, so many to choose from!

      I’m going to go for some social scientists for you: Starting with the psychologist Sigmund Freud because he developed psychoanalysis, and he established new ways of thinking about ourselves, even if his theories are no longer in use.

      Pierre Bourdieu was a sociologist of great importance. He established what he called the “cultural deprivation theory,” which states that people tend to think higher class cultures are better than lower class cultures.

      Finally, Waldo R. Tobler was an influential American-Swiss geographer and cartographer. His idea that “Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related to each other” is referred to as the “First law of geography,”!

      Their work was quieter but created changes in our social attitudes, the way we treat each other, and how we understand our place in the world.

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