• Question: If you could meet and debate with any scientist (regardless of whether they are dead or not) who would it be?

    Asked by doctorwhomadperson to Davie, Gemma, James P, James V, Nuala on 28 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: James Verdon

      James Verdon answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      Hi doctorwho,

      The scientists I most admire are the ones who came up with quantum mechanics and relativity at the beginning of the 20th Century. Einstein is the most famous of them, but also Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schroedinger and Paul Dirac, among others. Paul Dirac came from Bristol, which is where I’m from.

      The work these guys did completely revolutionised our understanding of how the world works – they were amazing. If I met them I wouldn’t be debating them though, I’d just be in awe of them, trying to work out what makes them tick, how they came to be such great scientists.

    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 28 Jun 2012:

      Hi doctorwhomadperson,

      I’d love to meet James Hutton, Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin. Hutton and Lyell were the ‘fathers’ of geology and they really started geology as we know it today. I’d love to go out into the field with them and debate at outcrops of rocks what they thought it meant and what I thought it meant.

      I’d love to meet Darwin and be there as he came up with the theory of evolution, a theory which changed the way we saw life on Earth.

Comments