• Question: who do you think id the greatist scientist of all time

    Asked by to Aimee, Chris, Dave, Greig, Laurence on 19 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Greig Cowan

      Greig Cowan answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      There are so many options: Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Curie, Kepler, Einstein… For me, I would probably say Newton is the greatest. He worked on a variety of different subjects (optics, mechanics, gravity) and provided great insights into the workings of the world.

    • Photo: Dave Jones

      Dave Jones answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      I’m with Greig on this one. I don’t think anybody changed our understanding of the world as much as Newton. He invented or discovered:
      -A mathematical way to describe Gravity
      -Calculus
      -A mathematical way to describe hot heat travels through a metal bar when you put on end in a fire
      -A mathematical way to describe how objects move, and how they react to the forces they experience
      -that the Earth wasn’t perfectly round
      -Built the first reflecting telescope (the type that is now used for ALL big telescopes)
      -predicted the movement of comets
      -explained the tides
      -proved that light was made up of a rainbow of colours
      -measured the speed of sound

      He was just amazing! But, he was also a bit crazy. He never believed in conventional medicine so spent most of his life poisoning himself with his homemade concoctions. He believed there was a secret code in the bible. He believed that was a magic way to turn ordinary things like wood and rocks into gold. So, he wins for making the biggest contribution to modern science, but that doesn’t mean he was always right!

    • Photo: Laurence Perreault Levasseur

      Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      I know it probably sounds cliche but I’d say Einstein. I really was truly a genius who contributed so much to pushing further the frontier of human knowledge. His discovery are truly the foundation of all our physical theories of nature today. He started two extremely important revolutions in physics. First he discovered special relativity and general relativity, which made it possible to understand why there is gravity and what is the nature of space and time. Second, with the photoelectric effect, he pretty much started (together with Planck really) the idea that the right theory of particle physics has to be a quantized theory, which means there has to be a smallest possible amount of energy, and that energy just comes in ‘packets’ not continuously. That’s pretty revolutionary and led to quantum mechanics and later to quantum field theory.

      But Einstein wasn’t only an amazing scientist, he was also an amazing communicator, he talked about the science to the public, he explained it to the people. He got them interested in what the scientists are doing, and this is really important. He was also somewhat of a philosopher, and a great moral man. Even today people still remember the quotes from Einstein.

    • Photo: Aimee Hopper

      Aimee Hopper answered on 21 Jun 2014:

      I’d go for either Richard Feynmann or Maxwell personally. Feynmann was a fantastic character in life, and an incredable scientist!
      And Maxwell summarised the equations that govern how electromagnetic waves interact in the 1800’s, and they haven’t needed changing since!

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