• Question: Who is your favourite scientist?

    Asked by 11wiloma to Suzanne, Martin on 14 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Suzanne McEndoo

      Suzanne McEndoo answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      Hard to pick a favourite, but Schrödinger was pretty awesome. He came up with a lot of early quantum physics, and even has his own equation. He was really interested in biology too and had a famous series of public lectures on what is life.

      He also came up with the Schrödinger cat experiment. You put a cat in a box with a bottle of poison and a radioactive atom. If the atom decays, the poison kills the cat, if it doesn’t the cat is alive. There’s a 50% chance of the atom decaying. Until we open the box, we can’t see if the cat is dead or alive, so we say that the cat is both dead and alive at the same time!

      Obviously nobody has ever done this with a cat, it would be cruel! But it explains something we call a superposition (being two different things at the same time) which is one of the cool effects in quantum physics.

    • Photo: Martin Zaltz Austwick

      Martin Zaltz Austwick answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      I like Richard Feynman – he was a brilliant theoretical physicist who played the bongos.

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