• Question: Who do you think is the best scientist ever?

    Asked by Berta444 to Stephanie, LauraAnne, Katy, Helen, Emilia, Dan, Andrew on 7 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Dan Gordon

      Dan Gordon answered on 7 Nov 2016:

      What a fantastic question. This is tough. There are so many choices. SO because it is so tough I will give you my top 5 (ish), in no particular order:
      1: Sir Tim Berners Lee: Worked at the CERN institute where he developed the World Wide Web and then gave this to the world for free.
      2. James Watson and Francis Crick: These guys discovered the DNA, the building block for life and from this has spawned a whole new world of scientific discovery.
      3. Joseph Priestly: He was the first to identify Oxygen and the first to realise that air was not just one element. From this starting point we were able to get better medicine, sports science, biological understanding and even engineering.
      4. Stephen Hawking. Possibly one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. An extraordinary scientist who challenged the known laws of physics and the cosmos.
      5. Archibald Viviane Hill: Hill was the first to discover that the human body had an upper ceiling for using oxygen and that this was linked to the ways in which our muscles contract. Without his pioneering work most sports science would not currently exist.

      Who do you think is the best?

    • Photo: Emilia McAllister-Jepps

      Emilia McAllister-Jepps answered on 7 Nov 2016:

      Hi, tough question.

      I’m not sure I could pick who I thought was the best scientist ever, but at the moment I think that I would rate several scientists as having a huge impact on sport in ways that you will be able to see.

      Dr Paul Hawkins, who invented Hawk-Eye technology is a computer scientist. His invention has been key in the development of tennis.

      Tim Kerrison, who is the Head of Athlete Performance for Team Sky Cycling must be doing something right, as this team has gone from strength to strength. Not only one athlete has dominated, the whole team seem to be able to perform time and time again.

      If I had to pick a Scientist from all of the scientists…..Marie Curie did some pretty good work!

    • Photo: Katy Griggs

      Katy Griggs answered on 8 Nov 2016:

      Great (and difficult) question. I would say Marie Curie as she was the first woman to win a nobel prize. One of her achievements was the development of the theory of radioactivity. She was so dedicated to Science that she actually died from exposure to radiation.

    • Photo: LauraAnne Furlong

      LauraAnne Furlong answered on 8 Nov 2016:

      hmmmm. that’s a big question! I have a huge amount of respect for several people working in my area, who do very interesting and advanced studies of how the body works, and are making a real difference to our understanding of how we move. Archibald V Hill won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1922 for his work into how muscles work, this is the founding research of the area I work in, and so he is obviously a very important person.

      More recently, I’ve really enjoyed reading about the lives of Stephen Hawking and also John Nash – he was a mathematician whose work is now used in economics, but he several personal struggles in his life which he successfully overcame. The film A Beautiful Mind is based on his life.

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