• Question: Who is your favourite scientist?

    Asked by anon-276004 to Marie, Christopher on 12 Jan 2021.
    • Photo: Marie Busfield

      Marie Busfield answered on 12 Jan 2021:

      My favourite scientist has to be Marie Tharp. She was instrumental in producing the first map of the ocean floor, including features that we’re really familiar with now like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. At the time she, like many female scientists, was not believed and not taken seriously but she produced the evidence that was impossible to refute and didn’t let all the critics hold her back!

Comments

  • Photo: Graham

    Graham commented on :

    Great question. I have so many heroes in science but I really like the early pioneers such as Charles Darwin or Alexander von Humboldt who were so ahead of their time in many ways. My favourite scientists of all time is Jacques-Joseph Ebelmen who in the 1840s used modern chemical equations to describe the global carbon cycle for the very first time. He did this only as a hobby as his main job was as a ceramicist. I like to think what he would have achieved had he not died so tragically young. His discoveries of how volcanic carbon dioxide cycles around the planet over millions of years were only rediscovered a century later by the Nobel prize winner Harold Urey!

  • Photo: Tony

    Tony commented on :

    There are so many, who are all equally amazing in their own ways.
    For me, William Smith was a real geological pioneer – he was actually a canal engineer, but he noticed that rocks of the same type and with the same fossils inside popped up all over Britain, so he mapped them out in different colours and created the first geological map – over two hundred years ago!