• Question: Who is a better scientist, Steven Hawkin or Albert Einstein?

    Asked by FootballFred03 to Andrew, Jade, Jessica, Kevin, Lynn on 15 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Jess Wade

      Jess Wade answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      Tricky question ! I think that Albert Einsten provided a huge amount of explaination of earth-based problems. He helped us a lot with the nature of light, how random particles move about in gases and how much energy we get from tiny amounts of mass (the famous E = m c squared equation). What’s amazing is that he wasn’t really appreciated at the time, and he was so young when he did it.

      Steven Hawking is a theoretical physicist, so most of his science is working out difficult maths equations. He has explaied an awful lot about something called ‘cosmology’ and the science of the early universe. We owe most of our understanding of black holes to Hawking.

      We really need both scientists to be able to even try to understand what’s going on in the Earth and beyond it.

    • Photo: Andrew Fensham-Smith

      Andrew Fensham-Smith answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      Currently, a lot of what Albert Einstein researched and wrote about during his career has been found to be true and extended to limits perhaps he didn’t even imagine! One example is that in very heavy elements (like gold) all the relativistic effects that Einstein wrote about begin to become important for the electrons in those materials because they are travelling so quickly. From odd planetary orbits to odd electron orbits – what he wrote and thought about has affected us now so it would very easy to say “well, Einstein is most important!”.

      But what about 100 years from now? Or 200? Steven Hawkings writings on black holes and radiation, big bangs and so forth might become very important for people who travel through space, who start sending out space craft which travel very far or very fast. In their society, Hawking might be seen as the most important scientist they can think of, and Einstein might not get a look in!

      As to your question – “Who is a better scientist”, it’s kind of harder to answer since there are so many different types of scientist, who work on different things, that it’s like saying “who’s more important, a plumber or an electrician?”. Sometimes a plumber is what you need to fix your pipes, and sometimes you need an electrician to fix your plugs, but you need both. Likewise, sometimes you need Einstein’s work to make your findings make sense, and other times you might need Hawking.

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