Question: who is your favourite scientist

Rhodri Jenkins answered on 18 Jun 2013:

I have a few. As a pure scientist, I’m a big fan of Galileo Galilei – the guy who discovered the Earth was round. The reason I like his so much is that there was a lot of controversy around this theory (as it contradicted some bits of the Bible) and was told by the Vatican not to advocate this opinion, and went as far as standing trail for holding “condemned opinions”. But he always stuck to what he knew to be true, which he discovered through scientific methods.

Apart from that, there’s a lot of people within my area of work I like. There’s Giacomo Luigi Ciamician, considered by many as the father of solar panels. He said this about solar energy;

“On the arid lands there will spring up industrial colonies without smoke and without smokestacks; forests of glass tubes will extend over the plains, and glass buildings will rise everywhere; inside of these will take place the photochemical processes that hitherto have been the guarded secret of the plants, but that will have been mastered by human industry which will know how to make them even more abundant fruit than nature, for nature is not in a hurry and mankind is.”

There’s also Rudolf Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine who realized that his engine could be run on vegetable oil, and in the Paris World’s fair in 1900 he ran an engine on peanut oil, which was said to run so smoothly that no-body noticed the difference. He realized that oil could eventually run out and said that “in any case, [biofuels] make it certain that motor-power can still be produced from the heat of the sun, which is always available for agricultural purposes, even when all our natural stores of solid and liquid fuels are exhausted.”

Bit of a long answer, I realize, but there are a lot of scientists I admire 🙂 Who’s yours?