Scientists and scientific idealism:

Discussion in 'General Science & Technology' started by paddoboy, Jun 28, 2015.

  1. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    We have had threads about who was the probably the greatest scientist on more than one occasion on the forum, and I also remember a TV show that listed and gave a reasonable decent rundown on the world's top 100 scientists in history. That was also interesting.

    I would like to ask another variation of this theme as follows.
    Which scientist epitomises the scientific ideals of ethics, hard work, diligence and genuine devotion to the cause more than any other? .
    Probably to a large degree another subjective opinion, and also probably there may exist someone who could fill that position, that none of us know of......Someone from the Lab across town for instance, could very well be a top candidate.
    Irrespective, in my opinion out of the well known giants throughout history, one certainly stands out.
    I'll list my opinion of who that person is after a few other candidates are thrown into the ring.
    Any nominations?
     
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  3. akoreamerican Registered Senior Member

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    Albert Einstein
     
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  5. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Galileo! He suffered, rather than abandoning the truth.
     
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  7. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Obviously both fit the criteria quite well, still I believe I have one that reflects even more total dedication in the face hardship, due to the conditions that had to be worked in.
    Not as far back as Galileo, and not quite as recent as Einstein although who I have in mind did get to meet Albert Einstein.

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  8. brucep Valued Senior Member

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    One of the most fascinating is Michael Farraday. Or Darwin. Marie Curie.
     
    Last edited: Jun 29, 2015
  9. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    brucep has it! Marie Curie, and equally in the early part of their research her husband Pierre Curie.
    They did their research in an old wooden shed with leaky roof and muddy floor.
    They needed to refine and filter many tons of pitch blende to extract a very tiny yet measurable quantity of Radium over 4 years......all heavy, repetitive, tiresome work.
    Rewarded twice for her brilliance and dedication, with Nobels in physics and chemistry, I see here as hard to beat for all the qualities that she obviously excuded.
     
  10. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    http://www.discoveriesinmedicine.com/General-Information-and-Biographies/Curie-Marie.html

    Marie Curie's (1867-1934) amazing persistence in the face of many research obstacles is enough to commend her to historical fame. Her contribution to the field of medicine is overshadowed by her initial discovery of two radioactive elements, polonium and radium. She used these discoveries to help develop therapies for disease.

    Curie was born Marie Sklodowska in Warsaw, Poland, in 1867. Her mother was principal of a local girls' school, and her father was a physics teacher. Curie excelled at school and was encouraged in her studies by her parents. Unfortunately, Poland was under Russian rule, and Russian authorities did not want educated Poles to become politically active and possibly lead a rebellion. As a result, Curie was not allowed to go to college in Poland. After working for several years, she left Poland for France, where she enrolled at the Sorbonne in 1891. Her meager savings barely covered tuition and rent for her one-room apartment, and she often went for long periods without food and once fainted from hunger during class. Her enthusiasm for learning did not waver, however, and in 1893 she received a degree in physics, graduating first in her class. While pursuing a second degree, she met Pierre Curie, who had made a name for himself by discovering piezoelectricity a few years earlier. The couple was married on July 26, 1895.

    Soon after the marriage, Pierre earned his doctorate. Marie was still working toward her dissertation, but had not chosen a topic. French physicist Antoine Henri Becquerel (1852-1908; first scientist to experiment with radioactivity) had just discovered that uranium salts emitted (gave off) energy. At his suggestion, Marie set out to find other substances that emitted such rays. It was known that the ore pitchblende possessed properties similar to those of uranium, so the Curies chose this ore as the starting point for their research.

    Research Leads to Results
    Within the pitchblende the Curies detected the presence of a substance that was much more radioactive (a word Marie Curie had coined, or made up) than even pure uranium. They extracted (pulled out) this new element in 1898 and named it polonium, after Marie Curie's homeland of Poland. Although the polonium discovery was quite significant, the Curies were not satisfied. They could tell from their tests that another element, thousands of times more radioactive than uranium, existed in the pitchblende, but in such small amounts as to be nearly undetectable. Another French chemist confirmed the presence of this element—which the Curies had named radium—by examining pitchblende's spectral (wide band) lines. This did not convince many scientists, nor did it satisfy the Curies, who were determined to prove the existence of radium by extracting a measurable amount. This would be no small task, since several tons of pitchblende would have to be refined in order to produce even a gram of radium.



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    Marie Curie.


    Pierre Curie abandoned his teaching position in order to assist his wife's research. Though Marie Curie was the engine and mastermind of the project, she and her husband worked as a team. In fact, all of the notes in her dissertation refer to the experimenters as "we"—neither she nor her husband are mentioned individually.

    The Curies spent the bulk of their life savings to purchase waste ore from Czechoslovakian mines. They rented a leaky wooden shed in which they could refine the raw ore, and for the next four years they refined and purified the pitchblende, producing smaller and smaller samples that were more and more radioactive. The exhausting process, ordinarily performed by a team of several mine workers, took a physical toll upon the couple. This work, along with the birth of their daughter Irene, was nearly too much for the couple. Only Marie's intense determination kept things going. By 1902 the Curies had extracted one-tenth of a gram of radium, enough for Marie to finish her dissertation.

    The Curies and Becquerel shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in physics for their contributions to the new science of radioactivity. Pierre Curie was also offered a professorial position in the Sorbonne's research laboratory, an offer that included his wife coming along as his lab superintendent. In 1906, however, tragedy struck when Pierre Curie was crushed to death in a traffic accident. Marie took over his position and continued his lectures at the exact point at which they were interrupted. She was the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne.

    Working Alone
    In the years after her husband's death, Curie conducted extensive work at the new Paris Institute of Radium. In spite of its mysterious properties, radium was used as a medicinal aid. Though it was often used without thought to its dangers or effectiveness, Curie proved that there were certain illnesses for which radium was effective. It played an important role in the treatment of cancer, and is still used for this purpose today. Curie also introduced the use of radium and X-ray technology in medicine. For the discovery of radium and polonium, Curie was awarded the 1911 Nobel Prize in chemistry, becoming the only person to hold two Nobel laureates in the sciences.

    Except for World War I (1914-1918), during which she drove an ambulance, Curie spent the remainder of her life studying radium therapy. Though the process was successful, she received no royalties from its use, since she and her husband had chosen not to make money from their discovery by patenting (registering) it. Late in Curie's life, the dangerous nature of radioactivity took a personal toll. Curie's long years of exposure to radium resulted in leukemia (a disease that effects blood-forming organs), which lead to her death in 1934. Today, Curie is historically remembered as an outstanding female scientist, as well as one of the world's greatest researchers.




    Read more: http://www.discoveriesinmedicine.co...nd-Biographies/Curie-Marie.html#ixzz3ePobbQTe
     
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  11. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    All the scientists mentioned so far had admirable traits, and the qualities that is the subject of this thread. Galileo, Darwin certainly had their share of trials and tribulations to overcome, Einstein had no problem standing on the shoulders of the giants that had gone before him, and to his credit extracted the two theories that the world could not do without now, in gaining more and more knowledge from space. time, the Universe and everything....Although the quality Albert had in abundance was humility.
    Faraday came from equally poor beginnings as Curie did to rise to the occasion and make his mark.
    Probably a lot more, so don't hesitate in listing them.
     
  12. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Einstein is an obvious choice. He is to be especially commended for advocating views derided by almost all mainstream physicists. While Planck is credited with being the originator of Quantum Theory, it was Einstein who first proposed that energy was quantized. Planck only proposed that Black Body radiation was quantized. Einstein was laughed at for this POV.

    Thus Einstein was the the originator of both Quantum Theory & General Relativity, incredibly important advances.

    BTW: Neils Bohr belongs high on any list of major contributors to theorhetical phsics.
     
  13. river

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    Einstein originated Quantum Theory ?
     
  14. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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  15. gmilam Valued Senior Member

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    Johannes Kepler. He abandoned his beloved theory when confronted with more accurate observations. The mark of one truly concerned with truth.

    http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/lectures/tycho.htm

    "
    Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) believed in Copernicus’ picture. Having been raised in the Greek geometric tradition, he believed God must have had some geometric reason for placing the six planets at the particular distances from the sun that they occupied. He thought of their orbits as being on spheres, one inside the other. One day, he suddenly remembered that there were just five perfect Platonic solids, and this gave a reason for there being six planets - the orbit spheres were maybe just such that between two successive ones a perfect solid would just fit. He convinced himself that, given the uncertainties of observation at the time, this picture might be the right one. However, that was before Tycho’s results were used. Kepler realized that Tycho’s work could settle the question one way or the other, so he went to work with Tycho in 1600. Tycho died the next year, Kepler stole the data, and worked with it for nine years.
    He reluctantly concluded that his geometric scheme was wrong. In its place, he found his three laws of planetary motion:

    I The planets move in elliptical orbits with the sun at a focus.
    II In their orbits around the sun, the planets sweep out equal areas in equal times.
    III The squares of the times to complete one orbit are proportional to the cubes of the average distances from the sun. "
     
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  16. Waiter_2001 Registered Senior Member

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    All the scientists I am aware of seem to spout giraffe dung from the nasal region.

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  17. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    You probably are somewhat of a recluse I suggest.

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    If it wasn't for science and scientists, you would still be swinging in the trees with your ancestors.

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  18. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Careful! That may be how he spends his weekends.

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  19. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    I second the motion.

    For a real short list, I nominate:

    Best math:
    Euclid, Pythagoras, Arcimedes, Bourbaki, Galois, Godel, Newton, Noether, Shannon

    Best physics:
    Mendeleev, Rutherford, Einstein, Pauli, Heisenberg, Curie, Planck, Fermi, Feynman. Dirac, Wheeler...

    Best sci fi:
    Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Kip Thorne.

    Best science:
    Mendel, Darwin, Watson and Crick, Rubin
     
    Last edited: Jul 2, 2015
  20. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Mendeleev - Physics?!
     
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  21. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    Yes, because his work on the periodic table anticipated Pauli's exclusion principle applied to electron configuration of the elements, valence, and it also transformed alchemy into the mature science of chemistry.

    Atomic physics would have gone nowhere without Meneleev's pioneering work. Work that originally met with a great deal of skepticism from colleagues, I might add.
     
  22. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    You are overinterpreting Mendeleev's work to drag in the Exclusion Principle, I think. What he did was chemistry, although the fact that the Aufbauprinzip of atomic physics was later able to account for the patterns he discovered was a vindication of the new atomic physics.

    Anyway a great man, absolutely.
     
    Last edited: Jul 2, 2015
  23. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    Craig Venter (accelerating the human genome project) will likewise be long remembered.
     

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