• Question: who is your favouret scienctist i like bill-nie-thescienceguy

    Asked by anon-201715 to Sophia, Sarah, Meirin, George, Emily, Andy on 6 Mar 2019. This question was also asked by anon-202058, anon-201740, anon-201761, anon-201591.
    • Photo: George Fulton

      George Fulton answered on 6 Mar 2019:

      Bill Nye is a great choice! My favourite scientist of all time is a man called John Bardeen. He’s the only person to get 2 Nobel prizes in Physics. Not even Einstein could manage that! He invented transistors, which are the building blocks of computers and he was the first person to explain the phenonmenon of superconductors. Superconductors are weird and wonderful things which carry electricity without any resistance and they are used in Maglev trains (levitating trains).

    • Photo: Sarah O'Sullivan

      Sarah O'Sullivan answered on 6 Mar 2019:

      Lise Meitner. She was very influencial in the story of nuclear fission but wasn’t recognised for the Nobel Prize for it and is still a bit of a lesser known scientist

    • Photo: Andy Buckley

      Andy Buckley answered on 7 Mar 2019:

      There are some obvious physicists connected to my area who are pretty aspirational: Albert Einstein, Emmy Noether, Richard Feynman, the list goes on. I think to be a bit offbeat, although still sort-of physics, I’ll nominate Claude Shannon: he single-handedly invented the field of information theory, which underpins *so* much of the world today from data transmission and compression to the “machine learning” and “artificial intelligence” that’s being used increasingly to automate our world. There are very few people who’ve created so many big ideas, apparently out of almost nowhere. Alan Turing was another amazing, though tragic, character in that area.

      I’ve also been fortunate enough to work with a whole bunch of amazingly talented people that you’ll never hear of!

    • Photo: Meirin Oan Evans

      Meirin Oan Evans answered on 7 Mar 2019:

      My favourite scientist is a person called “The ATLAS Collaboration”. Over 1000 science documents come up when you search their name https://arxiv.org/search/?searchtype=author&query=ATLAS+Collaboration.
      Jokes aside, the ATLAS Collaboration isn’t really one person, it’s a team of thousands of scientists all working together. This shows how big science is done nowadays. Everyone plays their part. In all of these 1000 science documents, the name of every member of the ATLAS Collaboration gets written, because they’ve contributed to the experiment in some way, no matter how big or small. I think this recognition of everyone’s hard work is beautiful.

    • Photo: Emily Lewis

      Emily Lewis answered on 8 Mar 2019:

      I like Bill Nye, he has good bow tie game.

      I quite like Marie Curie, she got two Nobel prizes! Two! In Physics and Chemistry. She discovered radioactivity which is a key part of my field. She also worked for the Red Cross in World War 1 helping treat French soldiers so she was a good person as well as super smart.

    • Photo: Sophia Pells

      Sophia Pells answered on 8 Mar 2019:

      Some of Richard Feynman’s books and lectures got me really interested in physics. I will have to agree with Sarah though and say Lise Meitner because she made incredible discoveries in nuclear physics and is very under appreciated.

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