• Question: If you could spend one day with your favourite Scientist (Dead or alive) What would you do?/Say?

    Asked by ryanpendlebury1 to Freya, Katy, Louise, Pamela on 18 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Louise Pendry

      Louise Pendry answered on 18 Mar 2010:

      Hi Ryan,

      She’s alive and I’d say “please give me a job, pleassssssssssssssse” 🙂

      I might not though. I met her years ago at a meeting and sat next to her. I was so nervous that I just talked total nonsense. LMAO. I think I managed to say something like “Can I ask you about your chickens?” and then went bright red… It was like going on X-factor and sitting next to Simon Cowell!

    • Photo: Pamela Docherty

      Pamela Docherty answered on 18 Mar 2010:

      Ooh good question. For me I would absolutely love to see their reaction to how science is now. For example, when James Clerk Maxwell was alive physics didn’t even exist! It was called Natural Philosophy.
      In the 20th century physicists basically rewrote the rule book, with Einstein’s General Relativity through to String Theory, which we are studying right now!

    • Photo: Freya Harrison

      Freya Harrison answered on 20 Mar 2010:

      In another question someone asked about favourite scientists and I picked two – Dorothy Hodgkin and W D Hamilton. Pamela commented to ask if it was true that Hamilton held some dodgy political and social views and I answered that it was. He was a supporter of eugenics, which is the idea that people with ‘good’ genes should be encouraged to have more children and that people with ‘bad’ genes should be discouraged or even prevented from having children.

      The original question is here:
      /hydrogen-zone/2010/03/who-is-your-fave-scientist-mine-is-entstein-but-i-do-like-frankenstein-was-he-created-by-einstein/

      It’s something that really disappointed me when I found out, because I admired his work so much. So if I spent a day with Hamilton I would talk to him about his views, try to understand why he held them and debate them with him. He was a professor at Oxford, where I went to uni, but he died the year before I went so I actually just missed out on meeting him for real.

    • Photo: Katy Milne

      Katy Milne answered on 22 Mar 2010:

      I am pretty keen on Leonardo da Vinci. He had some brilliant engineering ideas which were well ahead of his time (like helicopters!) and was also a pioneer in anatomy. He used to cut up dead bodies even though the catholic church, which was very powerful at the time, was against it. I would like to ask him who Mona Lisa was. I would like to ask him whether it was worth breaking the rules for his scientific advances. I would like to show him some pictures of some of the things that I work on (helicopters and aeroplanes) so that he can see that his ideas have come to life and how we have solved some of the problems he was so interested in. Maybe some time in the future, I will get a chance to travel back in time and speak to him. Maybe he doesn’t think of helicopters till I meet him in the past and show him them! Who knows?

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