• Question: If you could go back in time and meet a famous scientist who would it be? :) and why?:)

    Asked by robynnconway to Duncan, Kiran, Paul, Sarah, Sharon on 23 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Duncan Murdock

      Duncan Murdock answered on 23 Mar 2010:

      I think it would have to be Charles Darwin. Not only were his theories arguably the most important change in how we view the world, but also he had a fascinating personality. He delayed publishing his work for many years, and would dedicate many years of his life to seemingly unimportant things like barnacles and worms (although I don’t think they’re unimportant). He had to put up with ill health, and a lot of controversy and opposition to his ideas.

    • Photo: Paul Stevenson

      Paul Stevenson answered on 23 Mar 2010:

      Hi Robynn (look, I got your name right this time 🙂 )

      That’s a great question. I think I’d go back and see Isaac Newton. He really gave the first set of laws (of gravity and of motion) that showed that physics was able to answer some major questions about how the world works, and apply mathematics to them so that we could make predictions – and we still use his laws to plan things like the orbits of satellites. It’d also be cool to go back to his time since it was so long ago that I’d get to see what life was like in the 17th Century.

    • Photo: Sharon Sneddon

      Sharon Sneddon answered on 23 Mar 2010:

      Wow, that’s a great question. There are so many people I’d like to go back and meet! If I had to choose one, I would pick Alexander Fleming. He was the person who discovered antibiotics, and ultimately has saved millions of lives as most people have had to take antibiotics are some point in their lives. I would want to ask him how he actually came to discover penicillin and if he realised at the time, how important his discovery was!

    • Photo: Sarah Mount

      Sarah Mount answered on 23 Mar 2010:

      Well, my favourite scientist is the Swiss mathematician Leonard Euler, so I’d go and visit him.

      Euler worked in almost every area of maths that was known about at the time he was alive and he even invented a few new fields of study himself. He even kept on working after he went blind, getting his children to help him read all his documents. He worked right up until the day he died, when he worked on the orbit of Uranus (which had been recently discovered) and spent some time with he grandchildren, so he seems to have had led full life.

      We still use some of the maths that Euler discovered in all sorts of areas of science, including computer graphics. There’s even a nice website named after him full of maths puzzles you can try out: http://projecteuler.net/

    • Photo: Kiran Meekings

      Kiran Meekings answered on 23 Mar 2010:

      I’ve got a couple – I’d love to meet Einstein as his ideas are the foundation of so much modern science. And also Gregor Mendel – you’ve probably learnt about him at school. He found out about the inheritance of genes through his studies of the size of peas – I’d like to talk to him about that!

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