• Question: who is your favorite scientist

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

      Daniel Roach answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      By all counts, it has to be the American particle theorist, Richard Feynmann!

      He wa awesome – as well as being a really smart guy, he had loads of fun in his life. He worked on the Manhatten project (the first successful nuclear bomb research) during the second world way, as a young scientist, and learned how to crack safes for fun. He hated music, but loved to play the bongo drums. He was funny and brilliant and had no time for people who were ‘fakers’ (people who pretended to know things they really didn’t). He was also the man who worked out what caused the first big space shuttle disaster in the 80’s… He loved physics, he won the Nobel Prize, he absolutely lived his life to the full. And many scientists admire him a great deal!

    • Photo: Simon Albright

      Simon Albright answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      I think I have to agree. Apart from being a physicist and all around uber-genius Feynman was seriously cool and just crazy enough to be fun.

    • Photo: Thomas Elias Cocolios

      Thomas Elias Cocolios answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      I love Marie Curie. She came from Poland to France to study, quickly married Pierre Curie to avoid deportation and postponed their honey moon because the experiment was running! They eventually went around France biking for 3 months until they got bored and decided to go back to the lab.
      She discovered many elements, with her husband but also on her own. As such, she is the first woman to receive a Nobel prize and the only scientist to ever receive both the Physics and Chemistry Nobel prize (the first for her work on radioactivity with Pierre Curie & Henry Becquerel and the second on her own for the discovery of radium & polonium). She has unit of radioactivity named after herself, the Curie.
      I even have a picture of her in my living room! It is unfortunately not a signed, I never really met her, considering she past away before WWII…

    • Photo: Clara Nellist

      Clara Nellist answered on 15 Mar 2014:

      Since Richard Feynmann’s been taken, I’m going to go with Carl Sagan.

      Carl Sagan was not only a great scientist who published over 600 papers, but he was also an inspirational science communicator. His research was in astrophysics and cosmology (the study of the universe) and his tv show “Cosmos” has been seen by at least 500 million people (according to Wikipedia anyway). But a personal reason that I’ve chosen him is that he wrote a fiction book called “Contact” about a female scientist who finds a message from aliens, and I found it so interesting that it was part of what inspired me to become a scientist myself!

    • Photo: Becky Martin

      Becky Martin answered on 17 Mar 2014:

      I have a bit of a fascination for Ada Lovelace!

      She was a Victorian mathematician, and worked on an early mechanical general-purpose computer known as the Analytical Engine, with Charles Babbage. She was a bit of a rebel because ladies didn’t do these things then, and that’s one of the reasons I love her. She also rebelled against her parents, as she was the daughter of a famous writer and poet called George Byron. I like to think she went for maths because it was so different to his work!

      We now have Ada Lovelace day to celebrate our scientific women, in honour of her.

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