• Question: Who is your role model e.g A famous person like Einstein

    Asked by anon-257652 to Adam on 23 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Adam Baskerville

      Adam Baskerville answered on 23 Jun 2020:

      A famous scientist that inspired me was Paul Dirac. He was a very gifted mathematician and physicist who was instrumental in building the foundations of the quantum mechanics we use today. I remember reading his work on unifying quantum mechanics with special relativity, forming the Dirac equation, and thinking how I am glimpsing into the mind of a magician. His book, “The principles of quantum mechanics” is one of my go to reference books.

Comments

  • Photo: Susan

    Susan commented on :

    He’s not a role model, because I could never aspire to be half as good (a tenth as good), but my hero is James Clerk Maxwell. It’s a name nobody recognises (outside physics) but to physicists he is up there with Newton and Einstein. He died young – only 48 – but in his short career he developed the theory of electromagnetsm that we still use today, co-invented (with Ludwig Boltzmann) the kinetic theory of gases and its application to the field of thermodyamics – which, again, we still use today, proved that the rings of Saturn must be made of small particles and not be solid discs, and in his spare time took the first even colour photograph. Key mathematical tools that we still use today are the Maxwell relations of thermodynamics and Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism. The equations used to understand the structure of galaxies are called the Jeans equations, but a footnote in my galactic dynamics textbook read “They were actually first derived by Maxwell, but he’s got some equations already.” Many people think that if he had lived to a ripe old age like his contemporary and friend Lord Kelvin, he might have beaten Einstein to the special theory of relativity (not the general theory: that really was a bolt from the blue, and if Einstein hadn’t thought of it I don’ know who else would have).