Good point, I was thinking more about his impressive achievements rather than him as a role model.

Well, that doesn’t take away from his scientific contributions. I am an excellent father, in spite of the obscene amount of effort I put through the years in playing terrible music.

Didn’t know that. Oh, well…

…Johannes Kepler ( 27 December 1571 – 15 November 1630) was a German astronomer, mathematician, and astrologer. He is a key figure in the 17th-century scientific revolution, best known for his laws of planetary motion, and his books Astronomia nova, Harmonices Mundi, and Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae. These works also provided one of the foundations for Newton's theory of universal gravitation...

Good inspirations here. Humanities need to be represented too, or those who made stem meet hum.

How about living ones?

Dr. Karl is a fun scientist & science communicator. I'm not so fond of his choice of shirts, but he does explain things in relatively simple and entertaining ways.

Also, a few Ig Nobel Prize winners deserve a mention - especially those who won the Chemistry prize in 2018 for measuring how effective saliva is as a cleaning agent.

He knows his stuff! Those shirts are en vogue. Again.

That's an awesome WC reading list!

Since you mention the Ig Nobel prize, I'll have my first choice as (Sir) Michael Berry, who got his Ig in 2000 for his theory for the magnetic levitation of frogs. He shared it with André Geim, who did the experiments and later got a real Nobel prize for his work on graphene. Michael Berry is one of the world's best mathematical physicists. Among other things he explained the physics of stars twinkling and of the patterns that sunlight make in the bottom of swimming pools. For normal folk, these subjects look so intractable that it is amazing you can make any predictions about them.

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Whatever works

Did you know that Dr Karl is, himself, an IgNobel laureate? He won around the turn of the millennium for his research on belly button fluff. We were all so proud of him!

I do, which is why I moved from Dr. Karl immediately to the Igs. He was quite proud of it himself, mentioning it on a few shows (both his own radio show at the time, and several guest appearances over the years).

Sometimes we need the ridiculous science as well as the sensible. Inspiration can come from strange places ...

Jared Diamond, for the scope of the questions he asks, and his ability to write books about them that read like thrillers. My favourite is The World Until Yesterday.

Oliver Sacks has passed away, but The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat is an equally inspirational piece of science writing.

„You can tell how clever a man is by his answers. You can tell how wise he is by his questions.“ Naguib Mahfouz (from memory, any errors are mine)

I love a bunch of Sacks' books. He was a classic. I gave so many of his books as gifts

And Gerald Durrell. Fun fun fun.

Abd Umberto Eco (fab semiotician).

When I was at the ETH in the 1990s there were some older professors around who remembered Pauli and judging by their anecdotes he must have been quite a funny chap to have around . Like many great scientists , he has little respect for rules or authority and was quick to find ways of respecting the letter of rules while doing the total opposite of what they intended .

Apparently he never managed to pass his driving test . Despite numerous attempts, because he couldn’t resist acting the clown

So I guess he must have been quite the character and the way people spoke of him , I wouldn’t say he wasn’t a role model .

I have it from the widow of somebody he worked with that he was the sort of guy you either loved or hated . There was no neutral ground . She hated him for his smugness .

Nooooo. Did this Nobel Prize winner try to split the Serious Science from the Non-Serious Science, too?

He does sound like a lot of fun. Intellectual property I think is linked to smugness, it is a fashionable subject of soc sci/sci of sci. I am glad we get to humanities, a bit. Bourdieu has done a lot of campaigning in this. He is not my role model. The theory is quite Marxist to me, patronizing in a way. No ownership = no smugness?! If one doesn't understand human nature and speaks only of idealized theory of a human and thinks of an ideal world as a real world, then there is no ground for real authentic altruism. I guess it was a long winded attempt to say that at the end of the day I guess I can tolerate an authentic lack of manners a wee bit longer than a pretended virtue.

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"L'homme ne peut pas remplacer son coeur avec sa tete, ni sa tete avec ses mains." J.H. Pestalozzi

“The only difference between a rut and a grave is a matter of depth.” S.P. Cadman

"Imagination is more important than knowledge." A. Einstein

Yes. The long-dead co-worker of his who told me that anecdote loved him. By his account, Pauli was fun, brilliant and a polymath, but he often found others a bit, shall we say: lacking. As illustrated by the famous criticism: „that’s not even wrong!“ Choose him as a role model by all means if you like, but prepare for the Pauli effect. There is actually a Wikipedia entry about it: „the supposed tendency of technical equipment to encounter critical failure in the presence of certain people“. I imagine that if a fearful young researcher has to demonstrate something to an autocratic uber-boss, his fear might manifest as that effect...

Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim: https://www.srf.ch/audio/input/wisse...ng?id=11985812

So interesting! As a Crystallographer, I knew Pauli's equation and physics works, but I had absolutely no idea about his EQ! wow, a real character! Thank you for the awareness thread, . Yet, as a Crystallographer, allow me to propose also Linus Pauling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling ) an incredible man who won 2 Nobel prices in unrelated fields (and that I had the pleasure to meet personally and learnt from).

An interesting anecdote about him -- despite being American, full professor, and a real figure in the American Academy of Sciences, he was 'ear-marked' because of his critiques to the American external policies and nuclear (war) programs. He had his passport removed for years. On one occasion, years later, coming back from US, he was asked by the customs officer: 'where he was coming from'. He answered 'I just returned from giving a conference in China'. The officer asked further "about what? " , to what he answered: "Hydrogen bonds".

I guess you can imagine the rest.... obviously the customs officer had no idea about chemistry, so he understood "Hydrogen bombs", to which, as expected, followed an immediate 6 hours detention & interrogation....

„the supposed tendency of technical equipment to encounter critical failure in the presence of certain people“ Just another quantum physics manifestation; see double-slit experiment observer effect

FWIW. I've never posted on this thread but met the OP and ..... Chemgoddess..... I really quite liked you

There's also the tendency of machinery (especially electronic devices) to have a higher chance to malfunction the more urgent the need for them to function ...

Telling folks „you‘re not even wrong!“ when they gleefully refer to the rainy weather as a valid argument against climate change might be the way to go...

Then again, that doesn‘t build bridges. Gotta hand it to contemporary physicists: they do their best, and their best is pretty damn impressive. Reto Knutti is a role model in that respect. Here he is, from 2:09 onwards: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fc6kAXmqv6M I appreciate how he separates the actual science (which is uncontroversial but, of course, simply descriptive, not about possible reactions) from psychological perceptions and political possibilities, which are highly controversial. There are other talks of his online, but none this recent.

Off to the demo.

Anybody mentioned Richard Feynman yet?

Incredible genius the likes of which are seen less than one in a hundred years, but incredibly able to connect to people and make complex questions intuitively simple. An incredible sense of humour and a great mentor.

There is plenty of stuff by him on YouTube etc that we can enjoy.

He was also another free spirit, rule breaker and maverick - maybe like all the great scientists. A man who didn't mind telling people who were too full of themselves exactly what he thought of them and wasn't overly concerned with being PC or even remotely polite if he thought you hadn't deserved it.