• Question: who is your favourite physicist, and what did they do?

    Asked by to Mark, Matthew, Mike, Paul, Sabina on 13 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Mike Lee

      Mike Lee answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      My favourite is Richard Feynman. He he famous for helping understand exactly how light interacts with matter. But he is also famous for playing the bongos and painting. I read his book, he said he learnt how to break into safes. But best of all he was very good at explaining difficult physics to people who asked him. Have a look here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjHJ7FmV0M4

    • Photo: Paul Coxon

      Paul Coxon answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      My favourite physicist is Ernest Rutherford, a straight-talking no-nonsense bloke from New Zealand. He was a physicist who started researching over 100 years ago. His work concerned the nature of the atom, which, at the time was still largely unknown.

      By bombarding a thin sheet of gold with a beam of radiation he showed that the structure of an atom was made up of a tiny positively charged nucleus surrounded by a shell of orbiting electrons. It completely changed our way of thinking about what the world around us was made up of.

      He was known to be a really hardworking boss (he was famously nicknamed ‘The Crocodile’ by his colleagues) but insisted his students stopped working at 6pm each night so they could have tea and cakes with his wife.

      He’s come to be known as the father of nuclear physics and famously said

      “All science is either physics or stamp collecting!” 😀

    • Photo: Mark Jackson

      Mark Jackson answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      Emmy Noether. She was a German mathematician who discovered the connection between symmetry and conservation laws. For example, did you ever wonder why energy is conserved? It is because there is no difference between doing the experiment today and doing it tomorrow. Noether’s Theorem gives the formula for what energy is, and proves that it is conserved as long as one is free to change the time of the experiment. The same idea applies to momentum conservation, charge conservation, and many others which are more abstract. It is not an exaggeration to say that all of theoretical physics is based upon her work.

      I might add that her career was a difficult one. She first worked at the Mathematical Institute of Erlangen without pay for seven years. She was then invited to teach at the University of Gottingen but some faculty objected and so she taught under a famous colleague’s name. The new Nazi Government prohibited Jews from working at Universities and so she moved to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. She died in 1935.

    • Photo: Matthew Malek

      Matthew Malek answered on 19 Mar 2014:

      Wow, this is a really tough question to answer! As one of the greats — Newton himself — once noted: “If I have seen far, it is because I am standing on the shoulders of giants.” Every new advance builds on what came before.

      So how to choose only one?

      I guess for me, it is a toss-up. A tie between Albert Einstein, who managed to discover special relativity, the photoelectric effect, AND brownian motion all in one year (1905). And then he went on to find general relativity, the cosmological constant, and more. Haven’t heard of all of these? Believe it or not, brownian motion was what he got his Nobel Prize for! Throwing in the rest, the man should have had several Nobels!

      The other half of the tie? That would go to Professor Herbert Bernstein, the man who inspired me to be a physicist. He was my undergraduate advisor and it was his excellent lectures that made me want to study physics. Before that, my aim was to do philosophy or psychology. For years, he was like a second father to me, and it goes to show that a good teacher can change your life entirely.

      That may not be the best or the most exciting answer, because Herb isn’t world famous… but it is the truth. Thanks for asking!

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