Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum Greatest living scientists

Hello everyone. Firstly I would like to apologise for the fact that I know very little about science. Of any variety. But that's why I'm here...

I work for an educational publishing company (not in the field of science you'll be relieved to know) but one of the things we do publish is inspiring stuff about innovation and enterprise and creative thinking. What I would like to know is who, in the eyes of the experts (ie you)are the greatest living scientists. What I need is info about people who are doing really amazing, mind-boggling stuff that will make your average 15 year old think "That is cool. Tell me more."

Any help greatly appreciated and feel free to take the mickey out of my lack of knowledge.

Cheers!

I find the question offensive.

You want the Paris Hilton of science and all I can think is to tell you to stuff a sock in it.

Why not just use Stephen Hawking's name. I'm sure you can make a buck off it.

I was going to suggest Fritz Haber. He was a German scientist who did nothing less than invent the agricultural revolution (nitrogen fixing).

Unfortunately, he also invented Zyklon B nerve gas for the Third Reich which the Nazi's then used to gas Fritz's family when they fell out of favor.

I think that's quite mind-boggling.

Better the "Paris Hilton of science" in the limelight than no scientists at all. I could think of worse things to make popular than science, DA.

I'm not a big fan of the Harry Potter books, but at least it made reading popular among kids again.

Ideals are great, but life is mostly one compromise after another.

It doesn't work that way. Folks on the bleeding edge of discovery are invariably pariahs. Richard Feynman's Nobel prize started with an undergrad tossing a spinning wobbling plate in a Cornell cafeteria. Richard Feynman wa a giant pain in the ass in person (ask Caltech, or NASA re Challenger), and he left almost no PhDs in his wake.

Barry Sharpless (asymmetric catalysts) was booted out of Stanford for being second rate. Bob Grubbs (olefin metathesis) similarly got whacked in the fanny with the door upon exiting Michigan State. Both became Nobel Laureates in Chemistry. One might imagine somebody would have noticed.

Bednorz and Mueller at IBM/Zurich were literally threatened with criminal prosecution for embezzling lab funding. They embezzled the discovery of high temperature ceramic superconductors which, 20 years later, still have no theoretical explanation. Nobel Prize in physics. A proper MBA manager would have prosected them anyway.

Kary Mullis thought of the polymerase chain reaction for DNA amplification (Nobel Prize) while driving stoned to his cabin in Northern California. Charles Pedersen at duPont screwed around with a little tuft of wiry white crystals that appeared in a huge reaction pot - he liked crystals - and got a write-down for what was the discovery of crown ethers (Nobel Prize).

Robin Warren and Barry Marshall showed the bacterium Helicobacter pylori causes stomach ulcers, not 100 years of infallable medical common sense. They were called idiots and worse. Their work was refused publication for being crackpottery. A century of drinking milk, eating chalk, and suffering a bland diet was replaced with some antibiotic pills and a Nobel prize in Medicine.

After Einstein's "miracle year" he went nowhere. General Relativity (GR)was ho-hummed for four years after its publication. The first GPS satellite launched in 1978 was not designed around GR. Engineers tossed in an offset oscillator as a second thought, just in case. Just in case happened exactly to the limits of computational and measurement accuracy.

The smartest man alive right now is possibly Ed Witten. He's weird. The folks who preceeded him, the five models of String Theory Witten unified, were repeatedly rejected for publication.

Major mentalities are high autists almost to a man. They aren't pleasant people. The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of the future, or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain. That is what political correctness seeks to annihilate - pain, uncertainty, risk, masculinity - and it will be the death of the future. Hush, I hear a funeral procession approaching even now.

Mediocrity is a vice of the doomed.

I found him to be quite personable. Very infectious in his enthusiasm for science and for life outside science.

Bob Dynes won the London Prize is condensed matter (considered by many to be 1 step below the Nobel). He is also a good guy. He managed to work well enough with people to make his way up to the head of the entire University of California system.

Albert Fert, who will likely win the Nobel Prize, is a good guy.

Doug Osheroff (Nobel Prize for superfluid helium) is well liked by the ex-students I have met. One guy I know who went to Cornell with him thinks he is a decent guy.

Maria Gephardt Mayer (Nobel Prize for shell model of the nucleus) and her husband (who was considered by some to be at least as bright) was well-liked by the old guy I knew who worked with them at Chicago.

Can you provide a link that shows this? I'll answer for you--No. It is a lie.

Yup, I've met a few guys who are likely Asberger's syndrome. Pretty damned scary smart. Not the majority. Even the smartest of those is a nice guy--as long as you aren't working on the same project, or if you meet him outside of the lab.

One of the smartest guys I went to school with (perfect score on the physics GRE) was a really nice guy and a good basketball player--if a bit odd. No one pegged him as being really smart on first (or second) encounter. One of his profs said that it was half-way through the semester before he figured out that the big guy in the back of the room and the guy handing in the best lab reports he had ever seen were the same guy. Another one, not quite as smart but still scary, could enough random knowledge to give Google a run for its money (do you remember your jr High locker combinations?). This without having a photographic memory. I don't think I have ever laughed as hard as when we were doing homework sets together--well, not all homework sets.

Most of the people I went to school with--undergrad and grad--were decent people. Most of the Ph.D.'s I have worked with are good people. This includes academia, industrial and government research labs.

Sure, there are smart jerks. Probably more than in the general population. But not that many. Most of the smart jerks I have run into were flame-outs who didn't live up to their potential. I don't know about the cause/effect nature of being a jerk and flaming out.

Ask Uncle Al what awards he has won in his career. Uncle Al is wallowing in his vice. There are annoying smart people. This does not imply that all annoying people are smart.

8-26-12. Said lock was last resident on the MSU/Department of Chemistry suggestion box circa 1973. If you stop by the CEM main lecture hall and the Master lock is still there, you might try it out.

Bednorz and Mueller were Officially researching high Cp ceramic wire insulation to thwart quenches in low temp (especially pumped) possibly high magnetic field supercon windings. Given that Cp asymptotes to zero cal/gm-K as T^3 near absolute zero, the slightest mechanical diddle (Lorentz force!) dumps enough energy locally to thermally quench the winding, and then things positive feedback exponentiate to failure. IBM wanted reliable high field supercon solenoids. Zurich is hard by CERN Accounts Payable.

What Bendnorz and Mueller were really doing was doping semimetallic ceramic lattices to map fractional electron count and internal pressure (via doped ion size in a given lattice) spaces. Management eventually caught wind of something irregular and issued an escalating series of warnings. It was nice of the universe to supply an unsuspected aspect reality for the pair to discover.

Uncle Al has an ACS undergraduate award in analytical chemistry. A signup sheet for consideration was posted on the MSU CEM announcement board and apparently only one name was written in. We're talking thousands of passersby. That is the difference between following orders and doing the job.

Analyt. Chem. 43(12) 70A (1971)

Feynman was a lot of fun in person. That is not exclusive of his concurrently being a giant pain in the butt, e.g., at a party with other men's wives. Feynman was the Gregory House of physics.

Decent people do not succeed. Decent people are invariably crushed by scumbags who know how to win a rigged game. Decent people have low expectations, a powerful patron, or can afford to be decent people for having successfully floated in a pool of other men's blood in earlier times.

Look what constitutes the US government. Their only qualification is carnivory - though a rich daddy helps. Science grant funding is not based upon future gain, it is a based upon a submitted PERT chart and the Good Old Boy network. Young faculty is starved. Tenured fat cats who have long ago eaten their own brains feast.

If it were any other way the 2005 National Science Foundation budget would not be 2/3 of the Project Head Start budget, in turn an insignificant fraction of the idiot War on Drugs budget, dwarfed by the "rebuilding of New Orleans" budget whose already proffered $billions disappeared without a trace (into privileged pockets).

Compare Title IX ("satisfaction of the interests and abilities of the historically underrepresented sex") to NSF funding. Can we as a nation risk coming up short for lesbian field hockey players? Never!

When this was first posted, I did Google search of Bednorz and Mueller and things like prosecute or embezzle or the like only brings up posts by Uncle Al to Usenet groups. The most recent one makes it pretty clear that this is not true. A link to the acceptance speech given by Bednorz:

http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/1987/bednorz-lecture.html

Includes, "We started the search for high-T, superconductivity in late summer 1983..."

Since the successful samples were produced in late 1985, this makes it painfully clear to the most casual of observers that they were searching for exactly what they found--new superconductors. Whoever told Uncle Al the story he keeps repeating misinterpreted or made up the key points.

As for Uncle Al: repeating this story--while knowing the facts--is an odd decision at best.

My, my - how the stuck pig squeals.

Read a technical journal. Hell, read all of them. Has anybody ever failed in anything since, oh, 1960? Hey git: Discovery of MgB2 as the highest temperature BCS superconductor was scutwork and accident by an undergrad doing 3-way combinatorial composition-property diagrams with a modified ink jet printer. The brilliance of the discovery and bumping it up into deserving hands came shortly thereafter. Collman's reagent was discovered by a grad student (obviously not Collman) with an alcoholic roommate. Na2Fe(CO)9 plus MeI gave acetaldehyde. The guy opened his glovebox antechamber and smelled his roommate. Things progressed from there, but the Official story seems to have enjoyed some polishing.

The Creutz-Taube ion is apty named. Creutz left the Varian spectrophotometer running when she went to lunch, allowing the hardware to make a leap of discovery in the NIR. Dr. Taube was one cool dude, now deceased. He suggested the ion's structure for synthesis and examination. Neither had any idea why theory did not reduce (nice pun, if you are knowledgeable) to visible practice until the accident. They succeeded beyond all expectation... but it could not happen that way today. Modern equipment won't start unless you tell it where to stop.

Weapons of mass destruction, energy independence, Homeland Severity, winning the war on... Are you stupid or malicious? Dump a gold medal and $1.3 million on Uncle Al and then listen to him extol praises upon his enemies. Not you, of course. There's no profit in that. Your roasting on a spit(e) of your own forging is too precious.

My, how the goofball avoids the subject.


Your link to the lies you have told about Bednorz and Mueller?

Perhaps I just don't see how a discussion of Homeland Security is on topic.

When you state something bad about someone else, you provide proof (the same works in science...give it a try).

you can
a) provide a scientific reference.
or
b) provide a link to an interview by someone directly involved.

Let's say, I state "Uncle Al copies other people's work and tries to pass it off as his own".

Well, I would use method (a), direct proof.

http://www.scienceagogo.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?/topic/1/713.html

If you wish to badmouth Nobel Lauriates, go ahead. But when you are caught in an outright lie, be a man and admit it.

The slow may presume to race with the swift. Barring government diversity intercession, the swift will win.

Good lord some people are easily offended...

The point of our project is that by relating innovation and genius to real people, you instantly make the ideas of those people more accessible to the non-specialist. The aim is to get students to understand the significance of scientific thinking in terms of their everyday lives, and be able to relate that to scientists.

Don't you want more scientists as heroes? Who would you rather have your kid idolise - Kelly Clarkson or Albert Einstein?

Yes this is a kind of popularisation, and no we're not going to be able to do justice to all, but without starting at a populist level, numbers of kids studying science, and the number of science teachers, will continue to fall.

Anyway, I will take a look at the Nobel prize winners of recent years, and choose some from there...thanks for this lead.