Question: What do you think is the best contribution/invention/discovery that anyone has made to science... It can be anything... Why?
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🙂 TRUE!!! 🙂
opalrox4eva53By BRIDGE8 under license from Mangorolla CIC 2024
By BRIDGE8 under license from Mangorolla CIC 2024
This is a really, really hard question for me, because there are many contributions and inventions to different areas of science that are really worthy and have changed either what we know about the world or enabled us to live better lives.
If I had to pick one- I’d have to say the understanding and using electricity. Electricity began as a scientific curiousity – people knew it existed and found it interesting but it wasn’t until the 1800’s that electricity was harnessed to be used in the way we use it today. Using electricity as a source of energy has revolutionised our way of life – from being able see in the dark (without having to buy new candles all the time), to powering computers, life-saving medical equipment, research equipment and now cars and many things in between. Electricity changed everyone’s lives – not just the ill or people doing research, and for this reason, I think it’s one of the best contributions made to science!
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I have been thinking about this overnight and I can’t decide between two things.
1. Antibacterials
Before antibacterial agents were discovered, and used in medicine and everyday life, people died from things that today we think are trivial medical problems. Infections can occur after the most minor of injuries, a small cut anywhere on your body, and many people used to die from them. Doctors would unknowingly infect patients because they didn’t know to wash their hands in between patients. And people didn’t know that you should wash your hands after going to the toilet, preparing food and touching animals. Many lives have been saved through the use and understanding of antibacterial agents.
2. The Internet
This one kind of follows on from Janette’s because clearly if we didn’t have electricity, we wouldn’t have the internet either! It’s hard to believe sometimes, but the internet has a lot of great uses other than Facebook and the proliferation of LOLcats! The internet gives us access to an immense amount of information, research and products which would otherwise be hard to come by. It makes communication between people so much easier, everything from staying in touch with friends and family overseas to online doctor-patient consultations for people in remote areas. It certainly makes the work of scientists much easier, we can find almost any research paper easily online, 20 years ago we could be searching through journals and microfiche for weeks and not find what we wanted. You are probably too young to even know what a microfiche is – ask your parents or teacher 🙂 Also, we couldn’t have done ‘I’m a Scientist, Get Me Out of Here’ without the internet!
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I will go with Internet. I wish I had invented it myself, see my answer at https://lithium.imascientist.org.au/2012/05/24/if-you-could-be-the-inventor-of-anything-in-the-world/
Internet is really a simple idea. Connect a bunch of computer networks together and let people come up with clever ways of using them. Connected people are more than the sum of people and knowledge blooms!
🙂
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