Download Senior General Knowledge - Famous Scientists

Senior General Knowledge - Famous Scientists
1. Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626) discovered and popularized the scientific method,
whereby the laws of science are discovered by gathering and analysing data from
experiments and observations, rather than by using logic-based arguments and the
natural philosophy of Aristotle.
2. Robert Wilhelm Bunsen (1811-1899) was a German Chemist who developed the
Bunsen burner we use today. He also discovered the elements discovered caesium
and rubidium with the physicist Gustav Kirchhoff.
3. Gregor Mendel (1822 – 1884) is known as the father of genetics. He identified many
of the rules of heredity which determine how traits are passed through generations
of living things.
4. Robert Hooke, (1635 - 1703) was an English physicist who
discovered the law of elasticity, known as Hooke’s law.
5. Marie Curie (1867 – 1943) was a Polish-born French physicist
and chemist who is best known for her contributions to
radioactivity. The curie (symbol Ci) is a non-SI unit of
radioactivity, named 'in honour of' Pierre Curie, according to
his widow, Marie Curie, who was on the standards
committee and perhaps a more likely candidate for the
naming honours.
6. Jane Goodall (1934 – present) is a British primatologist and ethologist. She is widely
considered to be the world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees.
7. Francis Crick, and James Watson and Maurice Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize
for Physiology or Medicine for solving the structure of DNA.
8. Rosalind Franklin (1920 – 1958) was a British biophysicist who is best known for her
work on the molecular structures of coal and graphite, and X-ray diffraction. Her Xray crystallographic data enabled Crick and Watson to determine the structure of
DNA
9. Who is the unit of measurement for weight named after?
10. Who first discovered penicillin which heralded the dawn of the antibiotic age? He
found that mould on old petri dishes was capable of killing a wide range of harmful
bacteria, such as streptococcus, meningococcus and the diphtheria bacillus.
J Griffin