Who is your favorite scientist and why?

[karlgoethebier]

Ada Lovelace for the palindrome

 21/5%

Albert Einstein for having smelly feet

 10/2%

Alfred Nobel for his contribution to battlefield science

 6/1%

Burkhard Heim for providing the missing link between science and mysticism

 3/1%

Claude Shannnon for riding a unicycle at night at MIT

 13/3%

Donald Knuth for being such a great organist

 19/4%

Edward Teller for being the template for Dr. Strangelove

 3/1%

Edwin Hubble for pretending to be a pipe-smoking English gentleman

 6/1%

Erwin Schrödinger for cruelty to cats

 36/8%

Hedy Lamarr for weaponizing pianos

 27/6%

Hugh Everett for immortality, especially for cats

 5/1%

Isaac Newton for his occult studies

 19/4%

Kikunae Ikeda for discovering the secrets of soy sauce

 5/1%

Larry Wall for his website

 46/10%

Louis Camille Maillard for discovering why steaks taste good

 6/1%

Marie Curie for the shiny stuff

 14/3%

Nikola Tesla for the cool cars

 70/16%

Paul Dirac for speaking one word per hour when socializing

 19/4%

Richard Feynman for his bongo skills

 54/12%

Robert Oppenheimer for his in-depth knowledge of the Bhagavad Gita

 11/3%

Rusi P Taleyarkhan for Cold Fusion

 2/0%

Sigmund Freud for his Ménage à trois

 4/1%

Theodor W Adorno for his contribution to the reception of jazz

 4/1%

Wilhelm Röntgen for the foundations of body scanners

 3/1%

Yulii Borisovich Khariton for the Tsar Bomba

 12/3%

Other (please explain why)

 21/5%

439 total votes

[Ratazong]

Pythagoras for his ability to haunt pupils with his theorem even 2500 years after his death.

[ExReg]

Archimedes. Two thousand years ahead of his time, but best known for what he discovered in the bathtub.

[karlgoethebier]

See also Le Thé au harem d'Archimède.

[erix]

Charles Darwin for making religion more obviously redundant.

[Athanasius]

Question: What do the following scientists have in common?

Michael Faraday, Charles Babbage, James Clerk Maxwell, Heinrich Hertz, Gregor Mendel, Lord Kelvin, Wilhelm Röntgen, and Arthur Eddington.

Answer:

<Reveal this spoiler or all in this thread>

Cheers,

[Anonymous Monk]

Just as high-IQ persons are known to be susceptible to a variety of other mental disorders, from antisocial personality disorder to social anxiety disorder, Asperger syndrome to rumination syndrome, bipolar disorder to depression, they are also susceptible to the god delusion. Lord knows why!

RD: "Fundamentalist religion is hell-bent on ruining the scientific education of countless thousands of innocent, well-meaning, eager young minds. Non-fundamentalist, "sensible" religion may not be doing that. But it is making the world safe for fundamentalism by teaching children, from their earliest years, that unquestioning faith is a virtue."

[LanX]

Just before this thread dives into throwing apples and oranges at each other.

What is a "religion"?

There are many very different dimensions

• believing in higher beings/deities
• ethical behavior (commandments like "don't kill" to "don't fart drive cars" )
• political impact (e.g. cast system or using priests as functionaries or seeing a king as gods representative )
• adopted traditions (from Christmas trees to female circumcision)
• ethnic group thru strict endogamy *
@Erix: Darwin didn't solve the problem of the watchmaker, and Kant proved long ago that there can't be any proof either way.

Instead of discussing the badly defined R-word we should concentrate on aspects affecting our past and future - especially in a globalized world.

*) updated

[chacham]

Charles Darwin for making religion more obviously redundant

Yeah, we knew well before him that not believing in a deity was sheer idiocy. His theories, however, made it even more obvious.

[james28909]

how does mr. darwins findings somehow remove the thought of a god or creator? you somehow insist that just because we evolve, that there is no sense of a god. care to elaborate?

[Arunbear]

Discoveries like those of Mr. Darwin keep pushing back the ascribed functionality of a god, or as Dr. Tyson puts it "god is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance."

[perldigious]

James Clerk Maxwell for the second great unification in physics and the second greatest beard in history.

[BrowserUk]

Paul Dirac for Fermi's golden rule and walking the fine line.

[talexb]

Tough choice, but I had to go for Isaac Newton .. a cutting from his apple tree (the one that dropped an apple on his head) ended up growing in my grandfather's garden in Grantham, which I thought was pretty cool.

[zentara]

Professor Irwin Corey the World's Foremost Authority The Professor speaks

Why? Because he has an internal Bullsh*t-Bingo generator running all the time, yet he speaks the truth. :-) Very important in this age of double-speak.

[ptizoom]

Bertrand Russell, Georg Cantor and Ferdinand Möbius tying the knot or is it not ...?

[perldigious]

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. - Bertrand Russell

One of my all time favorite quotes.

[BrowserUk]

One of my all time favorite quotes.

Really!? Why? Do you like the metre? (Dah da da dah da da, dah dah da da da da.)

Or perhaps its a schoolboy puerility regarding the eleventh word?

Because you obviously never looked into who Bertrand Russell was: At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had "never been any of these things, in any profound sense"

You might as well cite: Miss Piggy!

[Anonymous Monk]

Once I understood equations relating to electromagnetism of James Clerk Maxwell during BS EE, no other (set of) equation(s) looked as beautiful.

These days I am more inclined to ask for the soy sauce.

[perldigious]

I'm the same way, and it makes me feel a little sad to think about it, and even more sad when I try futilely to get back to that same understanding only to realize so much of the mathematical foundation required to understand them vacated my brain long ago as well. I suspect a lot of EE majors who actually bothered to really understand them at the time feel the same way.

Do you remember feeling like you used to love what you do because of that sort of understanding and the ability to observe it in the world around you? Pepperidge Farm... er... perldigious remembers. Successfully bringing a practical design to fruition is a good feeling, but it only took me a few years out of college to figure out that the bulk of my career as an EE would instead be spent doing tedious paperwork, dealing with corporate bureaucracy and politics, and constantly trying to appease various members of $management who often have completely conflicting goals and nearly all of whom ultimately only have the goal of staying in power or acquiring more.

That last link is sort of long, but it's very good and he ties everything back to business and the general world outside of politics at the end. My friend sent it to me when I was lamenting to him that, "I just want autonomy, freedom over myself, and I just don't get why the overwhelming majority of people in the world seem to want authority over others. So yes, I do have an 'authority problem', the authorities in question are just framing the problem differently than me. If one of them tells me to jump off the building with nothing but an umbrella to break my fall, I'm going to insist they 'lead by example' first to get my 'buy in'."

[Anonymous Monk]

Do you remember feeling like you used to love what you do because of that sort of understanding and the ability to observe it in the world around you?

Yes, as a programmer (for fun & profit) I sometimes do think that something could be solved/eased by programming. For example, I was filing a form at a branch office; data from that form would be entered by hand to be transferred to the main office. Reply to my question of why not add required software & network to do this was that status quo gives local branch more control; there is nobody hovering around.

In some other instances, I often think that installing a programming environment (& learning whichever programming language) would make life of otherwise non-programmers (or, "I am not a computer person"-people) much easier.

When I was involved in (amateur) photography, I was nearly always finding if a image would be better with this perspective or that angle; fully open aperture or 1-2 stops down, etc. Also, somebody's image could have improved by just a bit of editing (increase in contrast; cropping; etc).

[Ratazong]

Doc Emmeth Brown for his sense of style to build a time machine into a DeLorean

[fishy]

Every little child, because of their natural-born curiosity:

Nephew asked: Uncle, why you don't have a car?
Uncle answered: Because cars smell bad.
Nephew said: So, don't start it!

[BrowserUk]

Nephew to Auntie: Why do you have Uncle?

Auntie: What do you mean?

Nephew: He smells bad and he said ...

[fishy]

...he will browse the UK with his new titanium micro scooter.
Auntie: Whaaat? Wait a second... Keep up with your Perl exercises...
Nephew: Mum said I can skip the smart-match operator!
Auntie: Ok. I will be back in a few minutes... Did you get the diamond operator?
Nephew: Yeees...!!

[eighty-one]

No option for Andrea Rossi and his E-Cat cold fusion system?

[karlgoethebier]

No. Choose [] Other (please explain why)

[Lady_Aleena]

My favorite scientist is my niece who is a high schooler who got two experiments into space already.

[karlgoethebier]

"...my niece...got two experiments into space already."

This sounds great. But remember: "Other (please explain why)".

Perhaps you can provide some details/links etc?

Best regards, Karl

[iguanodon]

Tesla

[BrowserUk]

I agree with you; Tesla was an amazing man.

But I disagree with the narrative you linked in one respect: having an earth-shattering, world-changing idea, but forgetting to write it down is really dumb.

Having a raft of of them, but failing to have the nounce to employ a doucheXXX to monetize them for you, is really, really dumb.

My Dad's favorite aphorism: it takes all sorts to make the world.

[iguanodon]

I hear you. I love The Oatmeal but that is only one side of the story. By all accounts Tesla was an odd duck, a brilliant scientist but not a good business man.

[karlgoethebier]

"...Tesla was an amazing man."

But he came to a miserable end:

"...just ten or twelve feet away from us there was this old man feeding the pigeons. He was standing up, and the birds were fluttering all around him, landing on his head and arms, dozens of cooing pigeons, shitting on his clothes and eating out of his hands, and the old man kept talking to them, calling the birds his darlings, his sweethearts, his angels." (Thomas Effing about Tesla in the novel "Moon Palace" by Paul Auster)

May be that this is yet another fake, who knows ;-)

[Anonymous Monk]

Mr ++Tesla didn't write them down because greedy people wanted his ideas for their own monetary gain.

[ikegami]

Carl Sagan, for hiding a circle in pi.

[LanX]

Talking about kabbalism and detecting super natural forces in numbers -> see Pi ;)

[Your Mother]

Or, maybe, see Pi. Shhhhhh!

[LanX]

Kind of Christiaan Huygens for saying:

The world is my country, science my religion.

... but in fact it's disputed if he ever said/meant this.

So probably better Carl Sagan for spreading the word.

But I also like Richard P. Feynman for his safe cracking tricks in Los Alamos and Albert Einstein for exploiting his popularity to pick up women.

[karlgoethebier]

"... Albert Einstein for exploiting his popularity to pick up women."

Women are very generous - even if one suffers from bromadrosis. And i always wondered if there is some dick/brain correlation.

[Anonymous Monk]

Ernest Rutherford for singing in the lab when results were good.

[Anonymous Monk]

Gregor Mendel for playing with food despite his mother Charles Darwin for invinting distant cousins to join us

[karlgoethebier]

May be i forgot Ivan Sutherland for Sketchpad. Any TX-2 veterans here?