• Question: Who do you think made the biggest contribution to finding out about the universe? (not yourself! :D)

    Asked by h6nn6h to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 15 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by littlechatterbox.
    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      Probably the guy that first had the idea for the telescope. It wasn’t invented by someone specific (or if it was we don’t know who), but without the telescope we wouldn’t know half as much about the universe.

    • Photo: Catherine Rix

      Catherine Rix answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      I agree with Adam, the telescope made a massive difference to how we understand the universe

    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      I think that individual discoveries and inventions are important, but nothing can match the amazing power of someone who can inspire other people to become scientists and astronomers.

      My favourite scientist of all time was a cosmologist called Carl Sagan, and while he didn’t find anything particularly amazing, he made lots of TV programmes and wrote magazine articles and books about space and alien life. He inspired me to become a space scientist, and I know hundreds of people also started their job as a scientist because of him.

    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 13 Mar 2012:

      Well I could say the three people who got the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2011 have been the least helpful – they demonstrated that we totally don’t understand what makes up 75% of the energy in the universe! 😉

      Perhaps among the most helpful in modern times have been Penzias and Wilson who found evidence that the Universe must have been much hotter in the past by figuring out that a “buzz” in their radio telescope was actually a left over glow from the Big Bang.

      Einstein did an enourmous amount for our understanding of gravity too of course. Did you know that if they didn’t use Einstein’s corrections to Newton’s laws of gravity the GPS in your car would be out by 10km more every day! 😉

    • Photo: Nazim Bharmal

      Nazim Bharmal answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      To finding about the universe in particular? That almost certainly has to be Einstein since he put together many ideas about what space is and what time is, and crucially promoted the idea of space-time using Relativity, and the two types called Special and General.

      This is important here on Earth too, and a good example is that magnetic fields are connected to electric fields using relativity. You can talk all day about the universe but it might not seem to matter to what you do at school. But really, the physics is all linked up.

      (Of course, Einstein didn’t win a Nobel prize for relativity. The idea was too advanced, but he did get one for the photoelectric effect. That phenomenon is used in, for example, light sensors in security systems which use laser beams to detect if someone is there. The man’s ideas do get about!)

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