• Question: If we didn't have many of the very famous scientists we know, how far do you think that we would be in our scientific knowledge.

    Asked by 357amem22 to Adam, Breandan, Gabriel, Sarah, Sophie, Walaa on 9 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: Sophie Williams

      Sophie Williams answered on 9 Mar 2018:

      Well I think that different people would have found it all out further down the line but we would not be as advanced as we are now in our scientific knowledge!

    • Photo: Adam Ruben

      Adam Ruben answered on 9 Mar 2018:

      The famous scientists are definitely important–most are famous for a good reason–but there are plenty of non-famous scientists who have contributed just as much or more. For example, have you heard of Maurice Hilleman? I hadn’t before I started working on a vaccine. He’s a microbiologist who developed more than 40 vaccines. You’ve probably been injected with something he helped develop. It’s been said that he saved more lives than any other medical scientist of the 20th century. So even though the famous scientists have contributed a lot, they’re not the only ones!

    • Photo: Gabriel Balaban

      Gabriel Balaban answered on 9 Mar 2018:

      That is a really interesting question. It is hard to know how long it would have taken to discover for example Newton’s laws without Newton. I think other people would have eventually discovered them though. Sometimes the famous scientists were truly geniuses who saw things that others didn’t, and sometimes they were simply in the right place at the right time. For example, Liebniz was a scientist who invented calculus, a type of mathematics, at the same time as Newton, so we would definitely still have calculus without Newton.

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