• Question: who is your favourite scientist?

    Asked by sophcolette123 to Chris, Dave, David, Fiona, Jack on 16 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by anon-32586, xoliviaburtonx.
    • Photo: Dave Farmer

      Dave Farmer answered on 16 Jun 2013:

      I think I already answered this in your favourite people in the world question, didn’t realise that you’d asked it as two separate questions. Sorry!

    • Photo: Chris Mansell

      Chris Mansell answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      My two favourite scientists are Seth Lloyd and David Deutsch.

      Deutsch is considered the grandfather of quantum computing. He is a very independent thinker. He has great ideas and then, whilst other people are building on them, he moves on to something very different, often something which no-one has thought much about, and thinks of something brilliant. For example, he made a very original and important contribution to our understanding of something in quantum mechanics called “the uncertainty principle.” He is also the main person who has thought through issues of how quantum mechanics affects our ideas of time travel.

      Seth Lloyd has the funniest laugh. I watch as many of his online lectures as I can. He has done lots of cool things in quantum computing. He worked out how one could use a quantum computer to understand chemistry and material science. He also developed a way a quantum computer could be used to solve lots of really big equations. Outside of quantum computing, he has looked a quantum effects occurring during photosynthesis. I have never got around to reading about the work he did during his PhD but his project was called “Black Holes, Demons and the Loss of Coherence: How complex systems get information, and what they do with it.”

    • Photo: David Freeborn

      David Freeborn answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      My favourite scientist ever is probably Albert Einstein. Basically, everything he did was revolutionary: relativity, quantum mechanics, proof of the existence of atoms, Brownian motion, laser radiation, lots of other things too.

      Richard Feynman was also definitely very cool. Not only an amazing physicist, but also a great Bongo-player (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKTSaezB4p8).

      I’m also a massive fan of Erwin Schrodinger. He was one of the most important people in developing quantum mechanics. Once the theory was developed, he hated the way physicists were interpreting the theory, and although his ideas never quite caught on at the time, I think they are really interesting, and we use them a lot today in so-called “field theory”. He wanted to abandon talking about particles altogether and describe all of matter in terms of waves.
      He also wrote a book on biology called “What is Life”, which is the starting point for a lot of our modern understanding of genetics.

    • Photo: Fiona Coomer

      Fiona Coomer answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      A guy called John Goodenough who turned 90 last year, and is still working in Texas. He came up with the theory about how magnetic atoms interact with each other in a solid as well as developing the science behind the lithium ion battery, so you should be thankful to him every time you use your mobile phone! In my opinion, he’s long overdue a Nobel prize. He’s also great fun to spend time with, but I was a bit star struck when I met him.

    • Photo: Jack Miller

      Jack Miller answered on 18 Jun 2013:

      For me, it’s definitely Richard Feynman. As David said, he was an amazing character — funny, kind hearted, insanely brilliant at what he did, and he even played the bongo drums. So much of modern physics owes quite a lot to him. He wrote a very readable introduction to one of the stranger realms of quantum theory, called ‘QED: A strange theory of light and matter’, and also had a hobby of safe cracking.

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