-
Asked by klb13mrbean to Freya, Katy, Louise, Pamela on 16 Mar 2010 in Categories: About.
Question: who is your fave scientist mine is entstein. =] but i do like frankenstein was he created by einstein? ;)
-
Freya Harrison answered on 16 Mar 2010:
Ooh, that’s a tough one. I can see why you like Einstein, I think the way he worked away at his theories while he had do do a boring day job shows how dedicated he was. And he always seems like a fun guy! Why did you pick him as your favourite?
Can I pick two favourite scientists? (Just to be difficult).
The first would be Bill Hamilton, who is probably the single most important evolutionary biologist of the 20th Century, but who isn’t very well known outside biology. He really revolutionised our understanding of how evolution works and how it can produce complex behaviours and also how it can produce society.
The second would be Dorothy Hodgkin, who was just amazing. She was a British chemist and she won the Nobel prize in 1964 for her work in discovering the chemical structures of some important molecules, like insulin (the hormone that regulates blood sugar and that some diabetics need to take to stay healthy). She was also one of the first people to start using computers to do science. I admire her not only because she did some really groundbreaking work, but also because she was an important and respected female scientist at a time when not many women even studied science, let alone became professors. And finally she was a very humanitarian person – she was an anti-war activist and a campaigner for a more equal society.
-
-
Louise Pendry answered on 16 Mar 2010:
Frankenstein was created in the mind of a novelist called Mary Shelley. Sorry to disappoint you!
My favourite scientist is someone called Marian Stamp Dawkins. She is a well known scientist – been in the scientific game for years and years and years. She’s kind of like one of the godfather’s (or godmother in this case) of animal welfare research (she won’t leave a horse’s head in your bed though if you cross her so she’s a bit nicer!!!).
She wrote a paper which started “Let us not mince words: animal welfare involves the subjective feelings of animals”. This was soooooo important as for years people either denied that animals had feelings – like pain, hunger, fear, etc – or said that scientists shouldn’t bother trying to study them as it was impossible. She stood up and pretty much said to the scientific community
‘Hang on a sec – that’s rubbish – animals HAVE feelings, it is POSSIBLE to study their feelings, and we SHOULD study them’.
And the best thing of all was scientists did which has really helped to advance our knowledge of animal welfare. If you don’t know what an animal wants/needs to make its life better its very difficult/impossible to meet those wants/needs so science is essential.If you go into the ‘Brain Zone’ and look at Anne Seawright’s profile you can read about her work looking at the ‘Emotional lives of dogs’. Basically she is looking at whether dogs see the world as glass half empty (pessimistic outlook on life) or glass half full (optimistic outlook on life) and what factors affect a dog’s outlook. Pretty cool stuff!
-
Pamela Docherty answered on 16 Mar 2010:
There’s lots of great scientists! I like James Clerk Maxwell, he was actually Einstein’s favourite scientist! Maxwell discovered the relation between electricity and magnetism. And no, Frankenstein wasn’t created by Einstein, it was a book by Mary Shelley. If I remember correctly, Frankenstein was the name of the character who created the monster, the monster didn’t actually have a name!
-
anon answered on 16 Mar 2010:
Wooo Hooo an easy question!
My favourite scientist is Richard Feynman. He is so my hero. If I built a time-machine I would go back in time to sit his lectures (He’s that cool!).
Feynman was a BRILLIANT mathematician/physicist and he was asked to join the atomic bomb project in the 1940s. Because it was during the war he got shipped off to a top-secret military compound in Los Alamos (the desert). Unlike the rest of the egg-heads there, he was very young and playful and there was little to do in the desert.
Do you know what happens when a BRILLIANT physicist gets bored?
No?
He starts new hobbies and Feynman’s was safe-breaking. Apparently, he kept breaking into the general’s safes and changing the contents! Just because he could. The general then bought an “unbreakable” safe and put all his top-secret documents in it.
“Ha Ha thought” the general, “My stuff is safe”.
“Ha HA!” said Feynman as he removed the safe’s contents. The general was no match for a brilliant mind – he had forgotten to change the safe from the default code!!Feynamn was also a brilliant teacher and his lectures on Physics got me through my degree. If I can be half as good a teacher as him, I will be amazing.
On the subject of Frankenstein, I bet the other girls have already said: Frankenstein was the scientist and the book was written by Mary Shelley after she heard about an experiment to do with running high voltages through dead-frog’s legs. The electricity made the legs move – scary! so she wrote an entire novella about what would happen to a dead human. Quite a good read actually. Bit of a distressing end though.
-
Katy Milne answered on 16 Mar 2010:
I just answered a question like this. I put Leonardo da Vinci and I have pasted the answer below. Einstein is definitely up there though. Like Leonardo da Vinci (see below), he couldn’t realise all the things he was thinking of (like travelling at the speed of light) so he had to just work it out in his head. He did ‘thought experiments’. Normally we learn by experience. Think about dropping a ball from a moving car. Does it fall to the ground in a straight line? Most people would say yes but it actually falls in a curve. That is not intuitive. Einstein was a genius because he could understand what wasn’t intuitive. I am not a genius. If something looks blue, then it is blue.
P.S. Frankenstein was not the monster. Dr. Frankenstein was the scientist and he created the monster.
I think Leonardo da Vinci. He was fascinated by anatomy. He cut up dead bodies to understand how our bodies were built, even though the church was against it and he would have got in lots of trouble if they found out. He was also an amazing Engineer. He drew the first helicopter and all sorts of ideas for mechanisms and gadgets. Unfortunately, he was ahead of his time and a lot of the materials that he needed (high-strength steel and lightweight aluminium, for example) were not available at the time so he could not realise his work. What an imagination though. Some of his drawings were ok too.
Comments
Pamela commented on :
Freya, I listened to a really great Radio 4 programme about Bill Hamilton, I hadn’t heard of him before then! Is it true that he was of the opinion that modern medicine somehow went against evolution, because it messes up the natural ‘survival of the fittest’?
Freya commented on :
Unfortunately Hamilton did hold some rather dodgy beliefs about eugenics (controlling who gets to have children so that ‘good’ characteristics get preserved or ‘bad’ ones removed from the population). Sadly these views were not rare in the early half of the 20th century, and a minority of people still think that evolutionary biology and the idea of ‘survival of the fittest’ can be used to justify prejudice. Judging him purely on his science, I’d still argue Hamilton was a really important figure and made a massive contribution to our understanding of how life works, but I don’t agree with a lot of his political or social opinions. I also find it odd that anyone working on the evolution of helping behaviours and cooperation could sympathise with eugenics. The thing is, people often interpret science in a way that justifies their existing beliefs, and I think this makes it even more important to get a good understanding of scientific ideas.
Pamela commented on :
Thanks Freya, that’s really interesting.