• Question: Who is your favourite scientist?

    Asked by Mr Singh to Joe, Jos, Kate, Lisa, Pierre on 7 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by Remzie, Loredana, Sarah, _M_A_R_, MLG PRO troll lols, Daisy <3, Liv, The Dark Lord Dianite, CNN News, 2 spooky 4 me.
    • Photo: Lisa Simmons

      Lisa Simmons answered on 7 Nov 2014:

      I love Lize Meitner. She faced a battle against sexism, and achieved some amazing things, but her greatest discovery was that of nuclear fission, which she worked on with Otto Hahn. Hahn was awarded the nobel prize and Meitner was completely overlooked by the nobel committee. Her work proves to us all, that no matter who you are you can achieve great things. She also has an element named after her Meitnerium! which I think is cool!

    • Photo: Joshaniel Cooper

      Joshaniel Cooper answered on 7 Nov 2014:

      I think it would probably be Einstein. When you hear his name everyone things of E=mc2, actually that was only a very small part of what he did. All GPS works because of him, he also worked out how lasers could work (many years before they were invented) and in many ways proved the existence of atoms. Most physicists would say that he is the cleverest scientist to have ever lived and without him it is possible that even now (100 years later) nobody would have thought of some of his theories.

    • Photo: Kate Dobson

      Kate Dobson answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      Probably James Hutton…. he lived in the late 1700’s and could be described as the father of geology. He was the first person to look at the different layers of rock and think that maybe they had something to do with the passage of time and the evolution of the surface of the planet. He was a doctor by training, but his description that “the land on which we rest is not simple and original” was revolutionary and controversial (and correct!). He notices that there were “time gaps” between some layers of rock – what we can call an “unconformity” and the rocks above this gap were laid down and a different angle. As he knew all the layers were laid down horizontally at the bottom of the ocean this meant that the lower, older rocks must have been rotated and eroded before the younger ones were deposited

      Have a look here ….

    • Photo: Joe Reed

      Joe Reed answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      I guess I don’t really have a favourite scientist, everyone has contributed something and thats what its all about, moving human knowledge forward.
      I will say about one scientist I like though. My liking of him comes from how twice he came up with world-changing inventions, and both times they became two of the worst inventions in history.
      Thomas Midgley Jr.
      When engines were first invented, they would sometimes not work quite right and would “knock” which was the noise of a small explosion happening where it shouldn’t be. To correct this, ‘Lead’ was put into the petrol. At the time it was brilliant. But Lead is very poisonous and terrible for the environment. After more than a few deaths and a lot of environmental damage, Lead has now been removed from petrol!
      Following that he decided to work on fridges. Before him, to keep the fridges cool, a range of explosive and toxic chemicals had been used, so he decided to solve this. He did this by discovering CFCs – the cause of the hole in the ozone layer. One of the most damaging chemicals ever invented.

      I can’t help but like him. He kept trying but got it so so wrong each time.

    • Photo: Pierre Lasorak

      Pierre Lasorak answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      I think my favourite scientist is Max Planck, who first threw the basis to Quantum Mechanics in the beginning of the 20th century. He was not at all happy with what he discovered but he had to admit that he could not explain things in another manner. That means at the beginning he was not even believing himself! His work now is one of the most fundamental of physics and I can’t help to think that it could only have been a piece of paper in a trash bin! This lead to a lot of disputes in the scientific world, but he was true, and the world would be very different without quantum mechanics…

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