• Question: what in ur opinion is the greatest ever scientific invention

    Asked by ixabdulxi to Andrew, Ben, Beth, Heather, Louisa on 16 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Andrew McKinley

      Andrew McKinley answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      The snooze button!

      Acually… thinking about it a bit more(!) I think that the greatest invention in the history of science has to be Language – without it, we couldn’t communicate our findings; without communication, every one of us would have to learn *everything* from scratch rather than being taught it from our elders. The advancement of science has always depended on different forms of communication; the ancients wrote their findings on papyrus and parchment – their findings were limited to those who could read and could make the journey to the library where the scripts were held. With the invention of the printing press, books could be printed in hundreds of copies much more easily than hand writing, and they could be distributed around the population. Again however, it relied on people being able to read and understand the language of science, which back then was Latin. The science discussed in the books however was usually tried and tested.
      With the advent of scientific journals in the 1800s, it was possible for seasoned scientists to keep up to date with more recent developments, and to publish their findings. This also marked a shift in the language of science from Latin to English.
      Today, the internet helps us keep up with science almost as soon as it is carried out, which helps stop us from duplicating effort that other people are already undertaking.

      So language and communication is definitely the most important scientific invention!

    • Photo: Ben Still

      Ben Still answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      In the past 25 years I have to say The World Wide Web. Undoubtedly! What has had a bigger impact on our lives that the WWW? Without it there would be no Facebook, no Twitter and no I’m a Scientist.

      The World Wide Web was invented for particle physicists (like me) but is now used by over 1.8 billion people worldwide(Ref 1). Tim Berners-Lee (Ref 2) is the man who first came up with the idea. He was a British scientist working at the CERN (Ref 3), the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, which is now home to the Large Hadron Collider (Ref 4).

      But I think the greatest invention of all time is Maths. A language in which we can describe and predict nature, it has been the essential ingredient in almost every technological advance and invention.

      Ref 1: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
      Ref 2: http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/
      Ref 3: http://www.cern.ch/
      Ref 4: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/LHC-en.html

    • Photo: Beth Dyson

      Beth Dyson answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      I think penicillin. It was invented in 1928 by Alexander Fleming and started being used as an antibiotic a few years later. It has saved millions and millions of lives throughout the world, and was the starting point for the mass production of all medicines!

    • Photo: Louisa Chard

      Louisa Chard answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      During the last 25 years, science has made huge advances in all fields, so answering this was hard as there are so many to choose from. However, in my opinion the INTERNET has probably been the most significant advance. It was invented in 1990 by a british computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who wanted to create a ‘pool of human knowledge’ that was freely available to anyone. We all use the internet everyday and it has become vital to learning and sharing ideas. It gives me immediate access to research from all over the world, which speeds up the development of new research projects and anytime I get stuck on experiments the chances are, someone else in the world has had the same problems I can quickly and easily find out what they tried to correct the problem.

Comments