Who in your opinion is the most important scientist to date?

Question: Who in your opinion is the most important scientist to date?
- Keywords:
  career,
  inspiration,
  people
Asked by anon-318198 on 15 Mar 2022.
- Veselina Georgieva answered on 15 Mar 2022:
  
  Marie Curie and Albert Einstein
- David Jackson answered on 15 Mar 2022:
  
  Science builds on the work of scientists that have gone before, what matters is reporting good science that stands the test of time.
- Matthew Macariou answered on 15 Mar 2022:
  
  Rosalind Franklin, Marie Curie and Isaac Newton have all had a huge impact on our understanding of science which modern day scientists and mathematicians use each day.
- Ian McKinley answered on 15 Mar 2022:
  
  This is very difficult to answer. Maybe for present conditions, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius is especially important, as he first predicted (in 1896!) that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect. If more people listened to him – or if Greta Thunberg had been alive then – maybe we wouldn’t now have the terrible threat of global warming.
- Charlay Wood answered on 15 Mar 2022:
  
  Democritus. He’s known as the father of science. He was from Ancient Greece over 2000 years ago. And he first said that everything is made from tiny little building blocks which he called atoms. Sadly all of his books were destroyed because noone believed him. But now, we know that atoms do exist! So he was right!
- Sophie Strickfuss answered on 16 Mar 2022:
  
  It is difficult to answer as scientists all bring their own contribution to their field. Someone discovering a vaccine which saves lives is as important as a science teacher who inspire students to become scientists.
- Andrew Parrott answered on 16 Mar 2022:
  
  David’s answer is correct that many scientists are involved in any discovery if you track back what the basis of the discovery is. As Ian points out Arrhenius speculated about effect of greater CO2 in the atmosphere back in 19th century – I remember being amazed by this when I learnt about it as a first year undergraduate. In the media at the time the coverage of global warming was still implying there was some doubt about it (there really is no doubt about it!), and I thought scientists knew about this more than 100 years ago! In my field some important scientist are Paul Anastas and John Warner as they (literally) wrote the book on my discipline (Green Chemistry). Because it is a relatively new field I have had the luck of meeting both of them!
- Amit Vernekar answered on 18 Mar 2022:
  
  The most important scientist is within you. You need to explore yourself if science interests you.
- Graeme Barker answered on 18 Mar 2022:
  
  I think that rather than any particular scientific discovery, the most important scientist would be the one who defined how we do modern science – i.e. that a hypothesis should be supported by evidence from experiments that can be repeated to give the same result. For that reason, I will go with Hasan Ibn al-Haytham, who first really popularised this scientific method. He lived 965-1040 in Iraq and Egypt, and is best known for his work on optics, though he did also contribute to astronomy and maths.

Question: Who in your opinion is the most important scientist to date?

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