• Question: what scientists do you look up to and why

    Asked by Phoebe to Connor, Jillian, Lidunka, Sarah, Steven on 18 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Steven Thomson

      Steven Thomson answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      I particularly look up to Paul Dirac and Emmy Noether, both of whom did their best work in the early 1900s.

      Paul Dirac was a theoretical physicist who solved the equation that predicts the existence of antimatter. Depending on who you talk to, antimatter either has negative energy or it travels backwards in time! It’s amazing that something like that could be predicted by maths, and then eventually found in experiments.

      Emmy Noether was a mathematician who came up with what we now call Noether’s Theorem, an amazingly elegant bit of maths that explains why we have things like energy and momentum, and why energy can only ever be changed between forms but never created and destroyed. I think that’s a stunning insight into how the universe works. Even Einstein said that Emmy Noether was one of the smartest mathematicians in history!

    • Photo: Lidunka Vocadlo

      Lidunka Vocadlo answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      @Phoebe I really like Richard Feynman. Apart from the amazing work he did in quantum physics (and he was a Nobel Prize winner among many many other accolades), he had a very different and unusual way of explaining things. He was a bit of a maverick and didn’t care what other people thought (only really smart people can do that). He wrote a lot of popular books including autobiographies that were funny, incisive and allowed ordinary people to get a glimpse of understanding of the physics world.

    • Photo: Jillian Scudder

      Jillian Scudder answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      I look up to the scientists who taught me as I was becoming a scientist, and the scientists who speak to the public about the importance of science! So for those, the ones who influenced me the most were Bill Nye and Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

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