• Question: Who, in your opinion is the: Greatest Physicist of all time Greatest Chemist of all time and The Greatest Biologist of all time? and who is the greatest scientist? and why?

    Asked by rennit to Adam, Geoff, Rob, Sheila, Suzie on 23 Mar 2011 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Adam Tuff

      Adam Tuff answered on 22 Mar 2011:

      Phew! Lots of favourites to go there! My favourite Physicist is definitely Nikola Tesla – he was supposed to have created the largest man-made lightning bolt and earthquake! He lit his labs using extremely high voltages to excite tubes of gas! He was a genius, but died penniless because he had really bad luck and Thomas Edison was a particularly greedy man who cheated him out of a lot of his credit and money. He was laughed at when he said we’d be able to one day transmit information and detect objects using radiowaves – but I guess he got the last laugh after the invention of radar and radio! Favourite biologist – I guess Charles Darwin- arguably the father of modern biology and evolution.
      My favourite chemist is Marie Curie – she was also a physicist yeah (she is the only woman to have won two nobel prizes…and one of only two people to have won two!), and she did lots of groundbreaking work on radioactivity – without her work I would not be doing the job I am today!
      Greatest scientist…I don’t know. Perhaps Einstein or Newton? Both were revolutionists of science in their day – and again they changed the shape of science forever.

    • Photo: Suzie Sheehy

      Suzie Sheehy answered on 23 Mar 2011:

      Good question! Not sure I can answer that because I don’t know them all… and I think some of them are often over-hyped. I think many scientists build on each others work to make a steady and often slow progress. Just because one person was in the right place at the right time to get their name in the history book doesn’t mean that it would have been possible without decades of forgotten scientists before them!

    • Photo: Robert Simpson

      Robert Simpson answered on 23 Mar 2011:

      Cripes!

      Physicist would have to be Albert Einstein, he was bad at maths and yet came up with some of the hardest equations I’ve ever had to deal with – he also had a sense of humour.

      Chemist would be Marie Curie, who bridges the gap between chemistry and physics by showing us all about radioactivity and then became the first person to ever receive two Nobel prizes.

      Biologist could be Gregor Mendel, who was a monk that paved the way in the understanding of inheritance and thus genetics.

      There are many great figures in all three fields – but those are definitely somewhere in the top ten for me.

    • Photo: Sheila Kanani

      Sheila Kanani answered on 23 Mar 2011:

      Wow great question. I’m not sure I can pinpoint them down just to a few people. I like scientists like Newton, Galileo, Coppernicus, Einstein, Tesla. I’m not sure I could rate the ‘best’ ones, I’m hardly qualified to know 🙂 But I like the ones who changed the way we think, the ones who werent afraid to put their views across even if it got them into trouble, the ones who gave their life to science and have gone down in history because of it.

      And I wouldnt know anything about the chemist and biologist of course. I’m physics only, sorry! 😉

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