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Who’s your favorite scientist and why?

Aurora62 7 Sep 24
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63 comments (51 - 63)

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1

Stephen J Gould gave a phD to a creationist and refused to take it back when I told the whole world about it @ Cornell College over 20 years ago....

@maturin1919 arranging evidence of tectonic plates to "earn" a geology degree was premeditated dishonest and vile.....the perpetrator immediately went to work at Bryan College Dayton Tennessee teaching his incompetent students "tectonic plates moved at 45 miles per hour to cause the bible flood".....that is the kind of credibility xian "universities" offer with "divinity" doctorates

@maturin1919 Good point, I think honorary doctorates are given out, but most of the rest are likely earned.

@Larry68Feminist Bet nobody a century ago would've believed things like this would still be occurring in the 21st century. I think a class action lawsuit by the students should be filed against the college for hiring this perp and allowing him to continue to teach.

@808Girl all the WJBryan applicants are like Jerry Falwell cult school applicants MUST DECLARE YOUR PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP WITH geebush jeehobah ghostholes....creationism is icing on that putrid freshman admission cookie

@808Girl he earned it my memorizing and parroting geology competence ....a skillful LIAR premeditated and successful.....just the sort to build a 2nd century of xian enemies of science for bible fetish fondlers

1

Depends upon the science....Astronomy Dr Tyson....chemistry, biology, mathematics and geology all have greats living and dead....there should be recognition for political science and our Atheism is globally suppressed and mis-defined by religious literature/dictionaries

1

Newton, Gauss, Riemann, Dirac, Einstein, Maxwell, Faraday, and Tesla, for the modern era. Hypathia, Euclid, Archimedes, Plato and Aristotle for starting the effort - there were many Arabs that contributed but I would have to look them up as their names are strange to spell for me. I would also like to give credit to Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, Babbage, Torvald, Stroustrup, Ritche, Knuth, Thompson for Computers and computing. Also there should be a large amount to credit given to those who helped with all the work that has gone into taking the discoveries Science has made and spent millions of hours working with the details to produce what we have today. Many of these people were women who never got one ounce of credit for their life's work. I am sure I have not listed many who should be here. Euler is one who has had a large influence - reading his work is gratifying as he is a great teacher.

1

Aristotle & Isaac Newton

1

If mathematicians are also scientists, poincare, Ramanujan, Gauss, Reimann.

Mathematicians use logic, not the scientific method, which requires empirical (laboratory) evidence.

1

Jacque Fresco. Sociocyberneering.

SCal Level 7 Sep 25, 2019

Thanks for sharing 👍

@Aurora62, @TimeOutForMe

Perhaps look into The Venus Project. It changed my thinking on human behavior.

@BryanLV
I'll definitely check this out. Thanks

1

I read Galileo's dialogues in college. They are wonderful literature, and a wonderful Socratic way to teach new ideas. It baffles me why they are not more famous.

1

Sir Humphrey Davy he invented the Miners' lamp, identified potassium and best of all discovered Michael Faraday.
He also treated chemistry as fun (which it isn't)

More names to look up and gain more knowledge.

1

My (late) dad. Because no five year old can ever know enough about Club-root Fungus in cabbages.

1

Myself - I seem to be the only one to fully understand the Infinite nature of time and space.

gater Level 7 Sep 24, 2019

I, too, have pondered and written quite a lot about infinity. I disagree with some mathematicians and scientists who seem to misunderstand infinity. It is a fascinating topic for me. It baffles me that people speak of more than one universe. If the universe includes everything, there can be only one universe -- infinite in every dimension.

@BestWithoutGods Very good, you are on the path to truth. There is so much misinformation in the Scientific community. Time and space are absolutely infinite, the largest flaws in the BBT is that time is effected by gravity - it isn't, and that space expands - it doesn't.

@gater

There are also some angles to these questions (age, size, mass totals of universe, or are they infinite, and what does that mean, etc.) that I think are psychological, anthrological and to do with the history of science. My impression is that the history of the matter, as science and scientists have matured in their understanding of what is around them, has been that over the centuries there was an increasing realization that the universe was bigger and older than they thought., but there also seemed to be kind of mental block as to just hypothesizing (or talking out loud much) that age or size or mass or what-have-you might be infinite. So, for example, you'd have a relatively new theory put forward and that theory would supercede the old ones and say to laymen (including myself), in effect, that the universe was bigger/older (etc.) than previously thought, but those old thinkers had it wrong, but the new thinkers now have a handle on it. There didn't seem to be sufficient self-awareness (in my own view) that some of the new theorists might (or might not) be repeating some of the same "meta-error".

@kmaz Philosophers as early as 600 bc claimed the Universe was infinite - although they spoke Greek and used the concept of "Borderless" - Infinite space is not a new idea - and it is true and accurate.

@gater

Thanks for the info. Notwithstanding that point, many of the pronouncements I hear from the scientific community (or heard when I was paying more attention) still seem to attempt to ascribe size and age to the universe.

@kmaz The modern scientist is obsessed with telling us how the Universe started - just one problem - there was no start. The BBT describes the start of our, and surrounding galaxies, their age and positions. But it also makes other claims that are completely false.

@gater
Yes, thanks, I get those things, and honor them.

I'm trying to make what I believe is a separate-but-related point as to a pattern I think I see in the history of science. At this point I'll give up trying to make it here, as I do not sense recognition of or thought given to my point, but may re-raise it in some other context.

@gater

I want to add - yes, I do get the point about modern scientists telling us how the Universe "started". About 20 years ago I can remember in some other forum trying to start a discussion around "size and age of universe", with it being a rhetorical point on my part - I wanted to bring home that as far as I could tell, nobody had shown me clearly that it was established that an age or size could be put on the Universe. I integrated the point then (and now) that the pattern here seemed to be every few years or decades or centuries some scientists (or in the olden days, perhaps clergy de facto overlapping into science) would come along to tell us a new size and age, but with a tone that said "this time, we have it down pretty good", but I hadn't yet really heard from a scientist (or historian of science) who would simply acknowledge a tabula rasa approach of "what if it really is all infinite?"

As to the Big Bang, I'm not a scientist, so I only have the time a non-professional can devote to cosmology, but my penciled in thought is to just regard it as our "Big Bang Neighborhood". This may not be the only hypothesis worth considering, and it may not be the only one that incorporates a truly infinite universe, but it's the one I've penciled in for myself, for want of running across another that is intellectually accessible to me.

@kmaz There was no beginning of time, the Universe has always been here, and always will be.
About 20-30 billion years ago, matter started condensing in our "observable" portion of the Universe, then about 15 billion years ago the Big Bang occurred which explains the age and positions of galaxies.

@gater

".... the Universe has always been here, and always will be...."

Yes, this is more or less what I've always explicitly hypothesized, though I am not sure of myself or able to prove anything or intellectually capable of understanding the various arguments on any sort of advanced math level, and I can think of one or two arguments to the contrary.

"....About 20-30 billion years ago, matter started condensing in our "observable" portion of the Universe, then about 15 billion years ago the Big Bang occurred which explains the age and positions of galaxies...."

Yes, about the same, that's more or less my penciled-in way of seeing our Big Bang Neighborhood.

There are to me some additional points to be made about scientists' pronouncements around mass amounts and density in our neighborhood, but can't write them out at this time.

1

Hard to pick one...... richard feynman was such a profoiund complex human being; lynn margolis broke apart our overstated belief in competition rather than cooperation paradigm which is so important to how to move forward now; and who can forget ignatz phillip semelweis for understanding and teaching how disease was transmitted by not washing hands and the need for sanitation and sterile practices in medical care.

Ignaz is a special one, but it was not him alone. His studies were not the first to realize that hand washing was a possible cure to puerperal fever and other infectious disease, but he was pretty much one of the most vocal physicians on the topic until he had a nervous breakdown. Ultimately, he could not prove his positions and was widely ridiculed by his peers.

It was work from guys like Louis Pastuer, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and Robert Hooke, who were pioneers of Microscopy, Mircrobiology who vindicated Ignaz. Although he was not the first, Simmelweis and several others had posited that there were things called germs that no one could see, but insisted they were the cause of many sicknesses. Pastuer, using newly upgraded microscope technology, actually first confirmed the existence of germs using microscopy techniques handed down from Hooke and Van Leeuwenhoek.

As Isaac Newton once said: “If I have seen further, it is only by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”

1

I forget his name, but it was the guy whose incredible insight and boldness in the laboratory enabled him to split the beer atom and create the heretofore unimaginable - sparkly, bubbly, effervescent beer!

1

Alexander Fleming - Penicillin was discovered in London in September of 1928. Dr. Alexander Fleming, the bacteriologist on duty at St. Mary's Hospital, returned from a summer vacation in Scotland to find a messy lab bench and a good deal more. His invention saved more human lives than anything before.

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