• Question: who is your favourite scientist?

    Asked by Big O to Francesca, Laura, Matthew, Andrew, Rebecca on 8 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by ellencole.
    • Photo: Laura Schofield

      Laura Schofield answered on 8 Nov 2014:

      What a question! There are so many!! I grew up in Manchester so John Dalton (who did a lot of work on colour blindness and atomic theory) was one that we heard a lot about.
      Then there is Marie Curie who is the only person to ever receive Nobel prizes from 2 different sciences (chemistry and physics) and who ultimately lost her life because of her research (she researched radioactivity and died of cancer caused by the radiation).
      Then there are the heavy hitters like Einstein, the Wright Brothers and Tim Berners-Lee who have made more well known contributions.
      I think my all time favourite would have to be an American guy called Paul Anastas though. In the 1990s he came up with a set of rules that chemists should follow to be more environmentally friendly. I think his work to improve the chemical industry and research is amazing and often goes unnoticed (many chemists know of his work but do not know his name!) I met him last year and started to get a little star struck until he made a joke and I realised he is as normal as you and I! He is a great guy and an inspiration to a Green Chemist like myself!

    • Photo: Francesca Palombo

      Francesca Palombo answered on 8 Nov 2014:

      Hard to say one…Probably all my supervisors! I truly appreciate their contribution to science and to my career development

    • Photo: Matthew Camilleri

      Matthew Camilleri answered on 9 Nov 2014:

      The word scientist can have a number of different meaning, it can either mean a person who works in science, or the proper definition would be a person who is constantly asking questions on how things work.

      Going for the first definition it is hard to say but I would delve in the history books and go for one of the greek philosophers; Pythagoras, who can be said was the father of mathematics.

      Going for the second definition I would have to go close to home, and say my father. He is by no means a real scientist, but he acts like one. He used to take things apart to show me how things work, he used to constantly ask me question so I could think about the answers. He also used to take me out to see the world and let me ask questions for myself, questions which he was more then happy to answer.

      The term scientist sometimes has the connotation that it should be an old crazy man, but everyone can be a scientist, irrespective of his/her education, as long as you keep on asking questions.

    • Photo: Andrew McKinley

      Andrew McKinley answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      Looking at the previous answers, there are no direct answers!
      I don’t really have a ‘favourite’ – there is some really cool work out there: something called “Spacially Offset Raman Spectroscopy” allows us to find out what material (i.e. what molecule) is inside a container without opening it – this means we can identify counterfeit medication without compromising the integrity of the packaging (so cool!) I don’t really know Prof. Matousek (who developed this technique) that well!

      For a popular personality, I really like Neil DeGrasse Tyson – he has a similar enthusiasm for what he does as I do for mine, but he is a professional communicator as well! He just makes everything he does effortlessly ‘cool’.

    • Photo: Rebecca Ingle

      Rebecca Ingle answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      I think Dirac, Schrodinger and some of the other founding figures of quantum mechanics are probably mine. The development of quantum mechanics was such a revolutionary time for science and it must have been an incredible time to be working as scientists were starting to look at things in a completely different way to what they had previously.

      There’s a very famous photograph from the time from a conference known as the Solvay Conference with a lot of these figures in it. It’s a great photograph (although most of the scientists do look rather serious!):
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_Conference

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