Why No Famous Scientists or Engineers?
(Bill Gurstelle is guest blogging here on Boing Boing. He is the author of several books including Backyard Ballistics, and the recently published Absinthe and Flamethrowers. Twitter: @wmgurst)
By what percentage do you think Sulu is more well known than the other guy?
In the blog Notes from the Technology Underground, I present reasons for the relative paucity of famous engineers and scientists.
Back in the 1970's, there were not many famous scientists or engineers, and now, there are almost none. If you disagree, try and name one, right now. Go ahead, try it. Who did you come up with? Carl Sagan? No he's dead. Try again. Stehpen Jay Gould, the Harvard dinosaur guy? No, he's dead too. Hawking? Sure, Stephen Hawking is alive, but he's far more well known for overcoming his disabilities to do great scientific stuff, than for his scientific stuff itself (does anybody really understand "A Brief History of Time?). Perhaps, on odd occasion a autograph seeker stalks MIT's Old Main in hopes of obtaining Marvin Minsky's or Noam Chomsky's signature, but really, very few scientists need bodyguards to keep away the star struck rabble.
On the "Q-Scale" of modern fame where Albert Einstein stars with a 54 and George Takai rates a 1, no living scientist or engineer even makes a blip on the Sulu's radar screen. It's pitiful, but the truth is that no technology related individual, with the exception of Bill Gates, pulls a higher Q score higher than Count Chocula.
The point is there are many, many excellent engineers although the majority of them are not well known outside of their own companies. In fact, the term "famous engineer" is an oxymoron on par with "nondairy creamer", "dry martini", or "jumbo . . . . (continues here.)
By what percentage do you think Sulu is more well known than the other guy?
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So I was reading a book by some scientist and he said he was horrified to find that tabloid newspapers were quoting his papers. He promptly rewrote the papers using the geekiest possible language specifically to avoid attracting attention.
Surprise! It worked! Scientists are now free to circulate any sort of nonsense they can think of without public review. And there is a lot of nonsense. Some of it is considered joke material even by the people who claim to believe it.
"On the "Q-Scale" of modern fame where Albert Einstein stars with a 54 and George Takai rates a 1, no living scientist or engineer even makes a blip on the Sulu's radar screen. "
Not even Richard Dawkins?
I wouldn't claim he's the greatest living scientist we have, but I would say he has a pretty high name recognition due to his excellent popular science titles and outspoken views on religion.
Famous scientists (personal rockstars): Michio Kaku. Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
(Sorry, I watch a lot of space porn documentaries.)
Sir Alec Jeffreys is pretty famous around my parts, although I did go to his university (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alec_Jeffreys).
Sir Tim Berners-Lee is pretty famous too.
I think the problem is the lack of revolutionary and easily understandable science/technology. Those two both invented both obviously significant and indiviudally impressive things. But take something like CERN, a massive experiment, a huge goal. Bit it's such a massive team there is no obvious celebrity to stand atop of it. And it's not like the scientists are want that kind of fame.
Oh and there is a certain Andrew Wakefield who got pretty (in)famous aswell.
Several years ago, Discover Magazine had a cover story about Mike Brown (you know, they guy responsible for Pluto not being a planet anymore because he kept discovering new almost-planets). I don't think his picture was the cover, but it was "The man who discovers planets" or somesuch.
As it turned out, he graduated from the high school my wife teaches at and that my kids attend. My wife only knew about it because one of the science teachers remembered him, but nothing else was made of it.
I found his faculty e-mail address and sent him an e-mail saying that if one of the school's alumni was on a Sports Illustrated cover (or even mentioned on an SI cover), they'd have the magazine blown up to banner sized in the front hall and the local news would be interviewing his coaches, etc. It was a shame that a distinguished scientist, making important discoveries and being written about in magazines and the internet and talked about on TV didn't even get any recognition whatsoever.
My wife did bring the magazine and discussed it with her history classes and when they heard about it, they thought it was cool (and many of them remembered him again when the Pluto thing happened).
My personal literary science heroes are Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet and Steven Pinker. Dawkins was high on the list well before The God Delusion thanks to his seminal book The Selfish Gene.
Those three are only famous in intellectual circles you argue? How about Jane Goodall then? Or David Attenborough? (who I am thrilled about meeting at the Cambridge, England Bicentennial Darwin Festival in a few weeks!!)
Living famous scientists and engineers? Off the top of my head, how about: Richard Dawkins. Steven Chu. Brian May (yes, he's known for the guitar, but he does have a Ph.D. in astrophysics). Craig Venter. James Watson (but yes, Crick is dead). Jane Goodall. You've already named Bill Gates, but Nathan Myhrvold is pretty well known too. Linus Torvalds. Maybe Stephen Wolfram and Dean Kamen, if only for their expert self-promotion. Steve Jobs, another self-promoter. But if we discount self-promotion, then nobody would be famous at all...
Scientists used to be mobbed by paparazzi just a few years ago.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28269
I wonder what happened?
Richard Dawkins?
There are several scientists I think of as household names, primarily for writing popular science books: Brian Greene, Lee Smolin, etc. But then again, I think my sampling of households is probably fairly biased...
"Why no famous scientists or engineers?" Maybe it's because when a journalist asks questions about their creation, the answer gets so technical that the journalist starts nodding off.
I've made a number of significant advances in a number of fields- for example, water purification. I'm sometimes asked if I got a big fat commission for a product that had $50M in retail sales. "Nope. But I did get my paycheck." I'd just as soon have any reward go to the poor stills on the manufacturing floor anyway.
Dr. Fajim of Saudi Arabia did give me a nice set of Waterman pens, tho, for designing a facility in Riyadh. Good enough.
I was/am acquainted with Whitfield Diffie, Sid Coleman, and Rosalyn Yalow, and have always thought of them as moderately famous. Maybe I just hang out with people who are more aware of science than average.
But hey, what about Steven Chu? He's the Secretary of Energy now. Doesn't that qualify as famous?
You could equally validly ask why no famous architects, or mathematicians, or even doctors. Journalists and lawyers, as part of their job, are media-savvy and photogenic. Most professionals are not. Engineers are no worse of than doctors, or architects, or ...
how did nominally communist countries establish "people's heroes" then?
If you look at the famous contemporary scientists you listed, it gives a big clue as to why there are no famous scientists: Hawking, Gould, Minsky, and Sagan are all famous because they are science popularizers, not because they are scientists. With a very few possible exceptions (Newton, Einstein, and Darwin; maybe Crick and Watson) no scientists are famous just for being scientists. Most scientists, even great ones, labor in near-total obscurity because what science does is so narrow and detailed that a single person's lifetime work would neither seem impressive nor comprehensible to anyone who doesn't actually do the same kind of science.
Also (and I say this as a scientist) most scientists really do make for dull companions at cocktail parties.
BTW, Noam Chomsky ain't no scientist.
Dean Kamen
Burt Rutan.
I blame the scientists. The list of things they have FAILED TO INVENT includes:
Jet packs for flying.
Flying cars.
Flying skateboards.
Robots that act like people, only funnier.
Time machines.
Cool-looking death ray guns.
Admittedly, that last one is probably just as well, from a societal point of view. Also, a lot of serious scientists work in a collegial and incremental way, standing not so much on the shoulders of giants as in a great pyramid of ordinary-size people. A team of very smart people is harder to hero-worship than a brilliant lone genius, even if the team gets the job done.
Bill Nye?
How 'bout the guys who did the mentos and diet coke videos?
Steve Jobs isn't a technology person? What about Sergei Brin? What about DVD Jon? Shawn Fanning?
Oh, you mean TRADITIONAL non-computer science, like biology or chemistry or physics. You know, disciplines where the great majority of Americans and 99% of the rest of the world's population are functionally illiterate. Why should a scientist be famous for an discovery that can only be understood by other people with more than ten years of post-secondary education?
I mean, I sympathize with the sentiment, but I think your premise is flawed.
Noam Chomsky is not a scientist. James Thomson, whom you've probably never heard of, isolated the first human embryonic stem cells, is a scientist and is still alive and doing great work at UW-Madison.
It has everything to do with us not revering scientists and engineers like we used to in the atomic and space age, i.e. a growing American disinterest in science. Now it's all about Biz Stone or Sergey Brin, he who can bring you the quickest location-based, social-media gadget that will also turn on your DVR and cook your pasta primavera while you shop. But I'll tell you that, while they now work for your modern convenience, none of it would be possible without scientists and engineers who are as smart as the ones we knew by name back in the 50s and 60s.
Comment #1 is overly negative. But it is on to something. The majority of scientists are famous only to the extent that they have to be. What is their incentive?
One of the secrets to a happy life is to understand that fame is not a benefit. Fame is a cost of doing business. In our celebrity culture, one in which fame can often be directly turned into other nice things (better acting roles; richer clients; more sales of your product; endorsement money; the adulation of sexy people) it's easy to lose track of the fact that when people want to be "rich and famous" what they mostly mean is "rich".
People do want to be respected. Some may even want to be worshiped. But respect doesn't scale well. The first 1000 worshipful fans are the best. The next few thousand are pretty good. By the time you're up to tens of millions of fans, and you can't have a simple public meal without being accosted, and you have to hire security to protect yourself from some of those fans, the excitement has probably worn off. Ever wonder why so many celebrities turn to drink or drugs, despite the alleged bliss of being famous?
The result is that the only famous scientists are those who have hobbies or side businesses that benefit from fame -- like a personal crusade, or a political cause, or a love of writing (amateur writers enjoy being famous because they want to know their work is being read; pro writers enjoy being famous because they like money). The other scientists are only as famous as the public makes them, and as their funding agencies want them to be. The limelight isn't what science is about.
How many corporations want their employees to become individually famous rockstars?
i'm pretty enamored with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, he's awesome sauce.
YES #3, I was going to say Neil DeGrasse Tyson. There's also a fairly large radio/science celebrity phenomenon going on-- between Talk of the Nation's Science Friday and Radio Lab, NPR listeners know quite a few scientists.
Also, Pop-Scientists like Malcolm Gladwell (who, I agree, are not the most rigorous scientists out there) are fairly popular.
Part of the reason that scientists are not quite as famous any more is a lack of ability to explain their work to the general populace. If I don't understand what a scientist does, I can't be expected to consider her a celebrity.
Many of the known - living and dead - are 'popularizers' of science.
Nobody likes 'em.
Conservatives are sore about stem cells and the fact that the earth isn't really 10,000 years old.
Liberals, well, I'm not sure why liberals don't like scientists, but if you have any doubts you should pick up a copy of "Harper's" some time. It could be that their way of knowing isn't linked to a personal narrative, so therefore isn't really legitimate.
How about engineer Ray Kurzweil? He's fairly well known. Programmer ('software engineer'?) John Carmack of Id Software is well known too I'd say. Larry Page and Sergey Brin aren't really famous names, but I think people would know them as the 'google guys'.
Bohr, Szilard, Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Teller all became rather famous from their participation in the Manhattan Project and the extreme relevance said project had to people's daily lives for the following 45 years or so.
Ever since the space race and cold war fizzled out, though, public attitudes toward science have become more skeptical, if not outright hostile (and not entirely without reason).
Also, it seems likely that most of the low-hanging fruit (of science, not technology) discoverable by an individual or a small team is plucked . Large teams (like at the LHC) don't carry the same cachet for their members.
Brian Greene?
Sir Bernards Lee?
Sergei Brin?
Al Gore? (Inventor of pants and the internets)
To a much lesser extent..
Sam Barros?
The Mythbusters?
Bre Pettis?
Jeri Ellesworth?
Quite possibly, the personality traits that lead most people to want to think about, and emulate, other people have little in common with the personality traits that make for good scientists.
Or all the would-be-famous scientists are quietly leading lives inside Intel, AT&T, IBM, the NSA, China, and so forth and so on - NDA's and employment contracts mandating that their work be credited to corporations and that they otherwise live lives of security and obscurity.
There's not much low-hanging fruit left. There's not much problematic, niggling questions that can be addressed by a single person working in their own head or on paper. There's stuff that will require a decade of well-funded team research and possibly an intricate, difficult revision to the accepted models.
Jack S. Kilby and Robert Noyce ought to be famous.
All those suggesting Richard Dawkins, Steven Chu, etc., you may think these people are well known, but I would warn against assuming that most of America is similar to the kinds of circles many Boing Boing readers probably hang out in.
As for Richard Dawkins in particular, probably the one group that knows his name best besides Biologists are creationists and IDers, and they probably rank him somewhere below mud on the "Q" scale.
Sagan and Feynman may be dead, but we have a bevy of rock star scientists:
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
Michio Kaku
Richard Dawkins
Robert Ballard
Dean Kamen - (A hack, but famous)
Gordon Moore - Inactive, but alive (Moore's Law?!)
Stephen Hawkings
How about Bill Nye? Anyone? ANYONE???
However, our generation doesn't have any Tesla's or Newton's. We seemed to have stopped discovering stuff, and are rather just proving what's already been postulated, or making what already exists more efficient.
Noam Chomsky is not a scientist.
What, linguistics isn't a science now? Someone tell the poor grad students who are taking all that data.
Engineering was for the '70's, right? Nowadays it's time for women to step up. The '20's are approaching. Who are some prominent women voices on the Internet? Um, I can't think of any. How about Tyra Banks?
Why is the Internet all men nearly 30 years after its national media take-over? If you can even find a female voice on the 'Net it sounds like cotton candy. It's not serious. Just the state of the Union. Whatever happened to 10th grade newspaper reading level? Now might I finish my education now?
@43: cough Xeni cough
This is a valid issue, but the author is a little overenthusiastic. "Can you name even one? Oh, no, he doesn't count. Nope, not him either. Not even one?"
Hawking is the obvious answer even if the author's friends have been living in caves. An informal poll around the office tells me that the average non-geek knows Hawking roughly as well as Oppenheimer and nearly as well as Einstein.
For the record, I read A Brief History of Time, and later the 10th anniversary updated edition.
Steve Wozniak is famous. Bill Gates is paparazzi famous; probably more famous than Tesla in his day.
Some clues about this article can be seen in the phrase "(does anybody really understand "A Brief History of Time?)" which is a book of dumbed down physics for popular consumption; and in the inclusion of Noam Chomsky who is not a scientist.
#32: "We seemed to have stopped discovering stuff"
You need to buy a book on molecular biology. Better yet, try to borrow one, because when you buy one it just becomes obsolete in a year or two.
Also, people seem to forget just how recent some of our fundamental discoveries are. Plate tectonics has been understood for less than fifty years. Just because it seems like old news to you doesn't mean that the discoverers aren't sitting next to you on the bus.
Don't get confused. The fact that you don't know their names doesn't mean that scientists aren't doing more great work than ever.
Chomsky has made some important scientific contributions in the fields of linguistics and computer science. That's just not what he's famous for.
That rejection of Stephen Hawking is assinine. He's a 100% legit physicist, and there's plenty of people out there who understand A Brief History of Time.
Having a face to go with a name is a big part of what puts a person into the public consciousness, so people who are famous for appearing in stuff have always been more widely recognized than people who do most of their work out of the public eye. Millions of people watched George Takai flying the Enterprise, but how many people get invited into Burt Rutan's workshop?
@32 I don't know all of them, but the ones I do know are popularizers.
They take their work and go about the business of making it presentable to the public, and then they actively try to show that material to the public through TV shows, books, radio shows...
Hwang Woo-Suk. OK, maybe everyday folks don't know him that well. But I am sure he's really well known amongst his peers. Is there even one scientist who has not heard of him?
And don't forget the entire population of South Korea. That's 50 million ex-fans.
:-)
Who Bill Gurstelle considers a "legitimate scientist" and the criteria he uses for "famous" seems a lot more telling about Gurstelle than it is about society as a whole.
On the flip side, there are a lot of inventions I feel people should be famous for but aren't.
The inventor of the internet - I can't remember his name. Why is this guy not lionized and adored?
Dawkins? Really? If we're talking about the case of scientists and engineers he would technically count. However, much of his work is simply a summarization of work by others. He's simply taking a stance and gaining a lot of attention by holding that stance.
No offense intended, but to put him in with Kaku, Hawking, Sagan, and quite a few others, there's not a lot of NEW discovery Dawkins brings.
But yes, he is quite famous lately.
Re Hawking: I would think at least as many non-scientists understand A Brief History of Time now (which, after all, is closer to "popular science") as non-scientists understood the theory of General Relativity when it came out. Yet to say Einstein wasn't a "star scientist" would be absurd.
I agree with Quothz on the line "Can you name even one? Oh, no, he doesn't count. Nope, not him either. Not even one?"
It's what happens when you already have a pre-conceived conclusion.
Joseph Priestly discovered oxygen. I don't know how we even survived before that, but most people don't even know his name. Very sad. :(
"how did nominally communist countries establish "people's heroes" then?"
Party chairman to propaganda minister: "Go make us a few people's heroes."
There might be some benefit in a propaganda machine manufacturing "science heroes," but ultimately I'm glad that's apparently no longer considered desirable and/or plausible in Western nations. We still haven't given up on the military variety though:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Lynch
haigh all , long time reader , first time commenter --
uhhhmmmm -- burt rutan anyone ??
http://www.scaled.com/
or is he not known in the " real " , outside , wider world ??
When I read this, Susan Greenfield and Sir Robert Winston immediately sprang to mind. Admittedly their hardcore science days may have gone by to sadly be replaced by lecturing, but they're still very much alive, ticking and doing entertainingly good work.
Einstein came from an era of modernism that lionized individuals that were believed to have broken free of traditional ideas in order to discover/invent valuable new "modern" ideas.
In the postmodern era that grand narrative of breaking from traditionalism to achieve modernism is thought to be considerably weaker, if not fully relative to other different narratives that seek to reward the sanctity of some traditions as equally as it rewards the destruction of others.
We live now in a largely romantic civilization that was disturbed by the hypocrisy of a prior idealistic rational culture that rewarded only a few with participation in the omnibus of human memory. It seems like a large percentage of BB readers are rationalists in nature and perhaps that explains the "happy mutant" moniker, a culture of successfully preserving rational idealism in the confines of a postmodern lifestyle.
And now for some Tim Berners-Lee quotes:
You affect the world by what you browse.
Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.
Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.
Intellectual property is an important legal and cultural issue. Society as a whole has complex issues to face here: private ownership vs. open source, and so on.
The Domain Name Server (DNS) is the Achilles heel of the Web. The important thing is that it's managed responsibly.
The Web is now philosophical engineering. Physics and the Web are both about the relationship between the small and the large.
What is a Web year now, about three months? And when people can browse around, discover new things, and download them fast, when we all have agents - then Web years could slip by before human beings can notice.
Celebrity damages private life.
Even though I think (as many have said) that the premise of the article is absurd, I must say I'm very glad I have this Answers plug-in that allows to to click on any name and find out who the person is.
I have an MSc, and have spent the last eight years of my life in science, and interested in science outside my field, and still do not know half the scientists that people have mentioned. Burt Rutan? Robert Ballard? Craig Venter? Nathan Myhrvold? Lee Smolin? I could go on.
It's interesting, and just goes to show how much projection people do -- "I've heard of the guy, and my sciency co-workers have, hasn't everybody?"
(Naturally I can be accused of projection myself, for assuming that most people haven't heard of the ones I haven't heard of).
Some science geniuses are appreciated only after they're gone (Gregor Mendel), so heroes of the may walk among us.
not quite what you're asking for, but here's some trivia on celebs with mild to moderate science cred.
From here:
http://ask.metafilter.com/42809/Is-Brad-Pitt-a-particle-physicist
Dolph Lungren is smarter than I would have thought.
Although scientists and engineers make the world go round (I really like Teh Intarwebz, penicillin, indoor plumbing, etc.) by virtue of the type of work they do, they don't often lend themselves to stardom. Most cutting edge technology and invention is only intelligible to a small percentage of the population, no matter how important the discovery. Often as not when an engineer or scientist makes the news, it's because of the breakdown of some part of our techno-web, rather than a new discovery, because bad news sells. Also the number of scientists who can communicate science to laypeople in understandable terms is vanishingly small, which is why Sagan or Hawking or Tyson become so notable, in addition to their own work.
There was a complaint about the lack of women in scientific fields. What about forensics -- two authors who are scientists in their own right are Kathy Reichs and Patricia Cornwell, both dealing with criminal forensics of the CSI type. And for good measure I'll throw in Dr. Henry Lee and Dr. Bill Bass (of the Body Farm), off the top of my head. The CSI tv shows have done an incredible amount to popularize science.
could it be? ...could it be that fame is ....dare I say....bullshit?
In order to get noticed by the mainstream media, you need to be someone that they can tell a compelling story about. There needs to be something to get the public interested - either a big emotional hook or some way that the story is going to change their life.
Most scientists, even the most influential, produce work in highly complex and specialised fields. It's difficult to tell stories about their work because most non-scientists (or even most non-specialists) won't understand enough of the setup or consequences to see why they should care.
A good example of this is the development of RNA interference, for which Andrew Fire and Craig Mello shared a Nobel prize a few years ago. It started off as a major insight into how cells regulate gene expression and progressed to a hugely important tool in biological research. As well as aiding basic research (it's hugely useful in cancer research) it's on its way to becoming a very powerful therapeutic technique for a colossal range of diseases.
Right now this is far too abstract for a good story: it's just a hard-to-explain toy for scientists and not yet in the "real world" so why would the public care? By the time it saves its first patient it'll be old news and hundreds or thousands of scientists will have made their own contributions to refining the techniques, diluting the original fame.
The only chance a scientist or technologist has of becoming famous is to work on stuff that ticks at least two of:
(a) the public can understand without much effort
(b) directly affects many people's lives
(c) is somehow controversial (emotional impact)
(d) produces pretty pictures
For example, the Hubble telescope is understandable (everyone knows what a telescope is, even if they don't understand the research) and produces pretty pictures that look great on the page.
And as you said, Hawking has an emotional hook to his story - there's no way that he's going to blur into the mass of dull scientists in suits.
There's a big list of scientists who've been briefly famous due to controversy (Craig Venter for the private human genome project), but that's not very well sustained. If you're counting engineers, Dyson achieved fame via an advertising campaign linking him personally to a tangible change in people's lives, the cyclone vacuum cleaner. But building lasting fame requires that your work has a sustained, repeating impact on people's awareness - like David Attenborough's nature programmes, or Robert Winston's "Child of our time".
Finally, there's an accusation that I've read from several places of a sustained anti-science bias in various media. Almost by definition most people working in media are specialists in the arts and humanities. Most of these people will have little interest and less understanding of science, making it much harder to get science stories published, or programmes made.
The argument runs that we have literature supplements and criticism of the latest theatre in our newspaper for those who follow the arts; why not science supplements for those who're interested in the sciences? Just like all the former arts students who left the arts for the real world but still like to dabble, there must be plenty of former science students who're still interested. The only compelling explanation for the omission that I've heard is that the (humanities-trained) editors assume that no-one will be interested in science. By extension, no-one will be interested in science personalities, so they'd never get the same interviews, much less biographical puff-pieces, as authors and playwrights.
What about E.O. Wilson?
He's famous enough to draw criticism from both ends of the (so-called) politic spectrum. (Ok, granted, that was in the seventies, but he is living, and writing popular books)
How about Dr. James Hansen, of NASA fame?
On reflection I'm starting to suspect that Mr. Gurstelle knows that the premise of this article is absurd but purposely posted it anyway to facilitate a discussion about mainstream cultural recognition of the sciences. If so, well played sir.
@ Bugs #57: You make some good points, but I bet I could name more contemporary scientists than playwrights. For all our obsession with movie and TV personalities, how many people can name even one screenwriter? I can only think of one off hand- Charlie Kaufmann. And that's largely due to the fact that he wrote himself into one of his movies.
Fame doesn't discriminate against the sciences, it discriminates against anyone who doesn't get a lot of face time in front of a large audience.
Perhaps it is also the decreasing lack of fascination with names and increasing importance placed on the accomplishment. Even the field of medicine has moved away from naming diseases and cures after people and towards describing the actual condition or chemical composition. Lou Gehrig's disease --> Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). Just a thought.
Lee Smolin's article:
WHY NO 'NEW EINSTEIN?'
math.ucr.edu/home/baez/no-new-einstein.pdf
Here's another:
WHY DO THEY LEAVE PHYSICS? PW Anderson
http://tinyurl.com/ln9k63
What, Stephen Jay Gould is dead? Man. :/
Dawkins is a tool, and no, I'm not a creationist.
egarding Rockstar Inventors in corporations, D. Lindsay's book "Madness in the Making" goes into detail about modern corporations turning against the "Show inventors" of past centuries No more Edisons, Bells, Marconis, Teslas. They're supposedly bad for business, and since the early 1900s have been frozen out of the corporate world.
Benoit Mandelbrot
Les Paul
John Hodgeman
Many, many people understand "A Brief History of Time". Very, very few understood the Special Theory of Relativity when it came out. Practically no one has every understood the General Theory of Relativity.
"A Brief History of Time" assumes a secondary education at most.
Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters.
What?
Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne, duh. Quoth Homer Simpson, "Batman's a scientist."
A serious candidate I didn't see above would be Temple Grandin.
It's worth pointing out, though, that famous in its general sense doesn't mean "BoingBoing famous" or "known to smart folks or even middlebrows" or even "having some measure of fame": it means that one wouldn't have to explain who the person is to almost anyone, anywhere, anywhen. Even to dumb people. Like, maybe Einstein would qualify, or the MythBusters duo in the States or wherever else the show airs (sigh). But almost none of the others named above would *really* count as famous. A fun game nevertheless....
I've been asking myself lately, who will replace Carl Sagan as the Rock-Star Scientist that will make discovery and knowledge cool again?
It seems that many people were thinking the same as me...Michio Kaku or Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
I have to agree that there don't seem to be the same kinds of popularizers and communicators of science as in times past. Both Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould were as well known for these roles as they were for research in their respective fields.
Don't misrepresent the article. It's about how the great unwashed don't know any scientist or engineer. To the great unwashed, I am quite great and certainly unwashed because I can't name a single baseball player.
litmus test for "scientist": do the priests want to burn you?
Certainly Ed Witten's a household name?!!!
In these days, people seek fame, rather than becoming famous, and the key character trait for fame-seeking is Narcissism. Which just happens to be poor foundation for a first-class engineer or scientist.
@65 In the case of Mandelbrot it's interesting that magazine ads were run to publicize him and his work.
http://www.digitalartform.com/archives/2004/11/benoit_mandelbr.html
Granted it was in Sci Am, but still an ad campaign.
Oh c'mon, everybody knows Ajay Bhatt.
Nothing new under the sun. How many people here know Claude E. Shannon?
He is probably the most influent engineer of the 20th century and nobody remembers him.
If we're lucky, Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey will be more famous than they would ever wish.
Santiago Calatrava
Structural engineer + architect =)
legend, very well known in dublin atleast
I must admit, sadly, that most of those names mean nothing to me. Why? Well, why would they? We get such information from the media. Magazines, TV shows and such are in the business of selling advertising space / time. They need to convince potential customers that their stuff is capable of attracting a lot of public attention. Science is generally boring to all but those involved. Sad? Nort really. Most 'squints' are happy to be acknowledged by their peers, with a few exceptions like Steven Wozniak. Science is just too boring for most of the populace. Except you guys, of course.
He might as well have asked, Why are there no famous painters or composers?
How many people do you think can name a living, working painter? Those whose names come readily to mind are all dead.
As far as modern composers, I can name one, John Cage, who I don't like, and he might even be dead. (Hmm, do the Jonas Brothers write their own stuff - maybe people can name a lot more "composers" than I give credit for.)
You could do the same in a lot of fields. People don't really pay attention to accomplishments. They prefer to ogle a sexy body and fantasize over a big bank account.
Santiago Calatrava
Oh his stuff is gorgeous!
But I just spent 3 years in an MLA program, otherwise I'd have no idea who he is.
No current famous sea captains, surgeons, explorers or aviators, why?
Because most breakthroughs have already occurred in theses disciplines.
It's the epiphanies that break away from the pack and garner the attention.
Create a platform to exhibit new, exciting ideas and they will come....
People -can- name folks they see on TV... that's about it.
You want famous engineers and scientists? Stick a camera in their face and make them say stuff.
Oh and make them -interesting-.
At the risk of repeating folks already mentioned: Dr. David Suzuki (he's pretty famous in Canada, although I respect that lots of folks outside of Canada haven't heard of him.) But as already mentioned, Woz, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Dr. Stephen Hawking all are stupid famous. And there are plenty of "b" level famous engineers/scientists - i.e. Dr. James Watson (the DNA genome guy).
Perhaps you could restrict you're overly broad statement to there are no famous scientists in the field of particle physics; which I think I'd have to agree with, until I had more time to think; but that would come back to, as already pointed out - there's no break throughs in that field at the moment.
Norman Borlaug
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_E._Borlaug
Stephen Hawking is famous for being a scientist. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak are famous for being entrepreneurs.
I have to take issue with the people who claim that Noam Chomsky is not a scientist. I suppose if you wanted to split hairs he's not a "pure scientist" although it seems to me that his field, which is linguistics, is very definitely a science. He has also made numerous discoveries in the field, which seems like a pretty scientific thing to do. So are we talking just people who build things or quantum physicists? In that case, this article makes more sense.
Not that Steve Wozniak was also on one of the most popular shows on TV this year... it's not just geeks who know who he is anymore.
Anyway, I'm an urban planner. This is a field that *does* affect people's lives. And how many famous urban planners are there? The most well-known are all dead (R.I.P., Jane Jacobs). Who now? Andres Duany? Joel Kotkin? Donald Shoup? Norman Krumholz? None of them have the name recognition that Stephen Hawking has.
Oh yeah, I also went to Caltech, and yes, Stephen Hawking totally counts (and yes, I've read and understood A brief History of Time). If the criterion was that the typical person picked at random would be expected to understand your work, then there would be no qualified scientists ever, not even Isaac Newton.
By the way, it's George Takei, not Takai. Pronounced ta-kay, not ta-kigh.
Nobody alive today is as cool as Nikolai Tesla.
how about Trevor Baylis, or James Dyson? minor perhaps, but i'd know them both by sight...
Nikola Tesla and Bucky Fuller are the Gods of Science (with Robert Goddard and Isaac Asimov as Demigods). By the way, I think Stewart Brand and Peter Schwartz are important pseudo-famous scientists, so I guess I have a pretty broad definition of what a "scientist" is.
Chomsky is a scientist, but the amount of fame he has for his political work is about 100 times as much as he would have for his scientific work alone.
Maybe this has been discussed already. There are many, many conferences, etc. where scientists and engineers gather throughout the year. There are many awards given out at proceedings. Why not make note of them in Boing Boing? Having worked on a repository, collecting scientific papers, these people have done phenomenal work over many years. It is is mistake not to attempt to follow and try to understand they many, many contributions.
Martin Gardner
Phillip Emeagwali, the most famous African scientist?
William Gosset!
"Stephen Hawking is famous for being a scientist. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak are famous for being entrepreneurs." I think this is solidly true for Jobs. But for Wozniak is he famous for anything he ever did other than invent, design and build? Is Edison a famous Scientist/Engineer? If so, why not Wozniak?
Last year only four percent of respondents could name a living scientist in the poll described here:
http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS99588+20-Mar-2008+PRN20080320
Less than 50% of people in the UK can even tell you where the heart is in a human body.
Basic anatomy 'baffles Britons'
Antinous @ 100 - do you have stats for americans asked those questions?
The occasional genius that give us hundreds of years of progress in science only come by once in a while. The fact that there are no apparent ones right now is no surprise.
That said, there are plenty of really smart people out there, and aside from the public figure scientists (Einstein, et al.), most people didn't know the 'famous' scientists of yesterday back then, either. For instance, I doubt if anybody knew or cared who Max Planck was outside of the high-level Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry fields, but he gave much to the science community at the time.
Even today, great scientists work behind the radar. Just think about the progress we've made in 20 years. We've seen 11 billion years into the past in space; we're building the James Webb Telescope to be launched, unfolded, and entirely self-maintained millions of miles from Earth, wayyy past the Moon; we're developing processors that function on scales nearly as small as atoms themselves; we're halted light to a complete stop. In the public sector, we've invented cars that help you park; help you stop; help you steer; run at such a high efficiency as to get dozens of miles per gallon (try the gas mileage in the 80's!); we've developed liquid-crystal displays; we've developed LCDs with LED lights behind each tiny pixel; the sheer amount of types of plastic that have been invented and the versatility of them has drastically improved; dentists fill your teeth with light-activated plastic that doesn't leak like mercury fillings do; MRI machines are simply amazing feats of science.
That's only a tip of the iceberg of the progress we've made in 20 years. Perhaps there aren't any super-famous public figure scientists nowadays, but I would argue that there's a far greater number of -- maybe not 54Q, but very brilliant -- people that contribute to science and technology in very meaningful ways in larger quantities than ever before.
"But for Wozniak is he famous for anything he ever did other than invent, design and build?"
Wozniak was famous among the geek community, but as of this year became much more famous among the general public by appearing as a contestant on Dancing With the Stars.
What about Elon Musk? Not really an engineer but a physics nut at least. I think he could be the new Bill Gates.
What's oxymoronic about a dry martini?
In all fairness, while performing artists and sport celebrities are seeminlgly disproportionate famous, it's a fleeting fame. Just check: How many famous dead scientists/engeneers do you know as compared to how many not recently dead actors or singers?
There are a few exemptions like Houdini or Caruso who became household names, but most seem to get forgotten when the last people who lived during their fame die off.
While names like Aristotels, Watson, Bell, Kepler etc live ob.
Craig Venter -- famous among Discover magazine -type readers, for being the evil-genius biotech billionaire from Bladerunner. Except real. (Nooooooooo!)
Neil DeGrasse Tyson -- famous among Colbert Report viewers for being Doctor Who. Except real. (Yes!)
But for Wozniak is he famous for anything he ever did other than invent, design and build?
Wozniak is famous for being the last computer engineer to ever to conceive, design, prototype, and produce an entire new hardware product line by himself. Thirty years ago, just before that became no longer possible.
Paul Sereno.
See, I named one.
Anyone who contributes to Edge.
Brian Greene. Kip Thorne (maybe). Hawking.
Dennett is a philosopher. Dawkins is a biologist, which is partially why his work of philosophy (_The God Delusion_) is so sophomoric.
I do work in linguistics. It's not philosophy (which I also work in). But it's not as much a science as cognitive psychology is (in spite of the fact that Chomsky thinks of linguistics as a branch of psychology). Here, I have in mind theoretical linguistics of the sort Chomsky does.
Most certainly John Hodgman.
Probably the best way to get our unsung heroes the notoriety they deserve is to chronicle their achievements in a biographical movie. The movie I would most like to see would would document the voyage of Vitus Bering and Georg Stellar. Yeah, baby!
Most of you know about Stellar's Sea Cow- the gigantic, docile manatee, and that after Stellar reported about it, it was hunted into extiction within 20 years. Nice going, you stupid f@%$&'s! But what about "Steller claimed the only recorded sighting of the marine cryptid Steller's Sea Ape"? What?!
So you movie producers out there, get up on that!
Ooh, don't forget Henry Petroski
Gates, Jobs, Edison: good technical skills, excellent geek-wrangling skills, brutal business instincts
Allen, Woz, Tesla: above guys' pet geeks, technical geniuses
That's how the system works. We wouldn't have the benefits of technology quickly without these teams. No geek's work could get off the ground without some sort of business plan, and a promoter without a product is equally useless.
How many famous dead scientists/engeneers do you know as compared to how many not recently dead actors or singers?
Most people could list hundreds of dead actors and singers and maybe three dead scientists/engineers. Dead actors and singers have video and audio records of their work played on television and radio every minute of every day everywhere on earth. People still watch The Wizard of Oz even though it was released 70 years ago and most of the cast's been dead for 40 years. Even Tupac has released more albums dead than he did alive.
"Hundreds"? I find that hard to believe.
I'm quite willing to believe that most American can recall the name "Judy Garland" and I'm pretty sure that many Germans would recognize the name "Murnau", but I doubt very much that they could identify the name of the guy who played Mina's fiancee or the cowardly lion - even if they watched the Wizard of Oz or Nosferatur just a week away.
And 70 years is nothing - that's still living memory.
A quick test: ask people to tell your five performing artists and five scientists before the year 1800.
Yes, I know that the younger artists are recorded and their fads will last longer. But even those will fade away, most of them.
Silent movies are already on the "obscure" list. Black and white is getting near that, with only a few exceptions. Stuff like the Superman Radio show is listened to by only a few friends. And lot's of 1960s TV stuff is only on DVD because of the 40-somethings' nostalgia.
Sad for Germany. You'd find very few Americans who aren't familiar with Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Bette Davis, Katherine Hepburn, Lucille Ball, Bob Hope and I could go on forever. IMDb is overrun by fanboys, but 27 of the top 50 films were released more than 25 years ago. Surely the German language has some vast compound word for deliberately erasing decades of history from personal memory. Either that or your projecting your own lack of knowledge about the performing arts.
As for pre-1800, You might get Newton for science and Mozart for art. Many people could rattle off the names of some classical composers, but would have no idea of their music or when they flourished.
"Surely the German language has some vast compound word for deliberately erasing decades of history from personal memory."
Anti-Vergangenheitsbewältigung?
(Vergangenheitsbewältigung = "coming to terms with the past"; so add the "anti-" to negate?)
Gewillte Vergessenheit? (oh sorry, that's two words).
One important factor here, I think, is 'the first'. Who discovered this, who invented that. These are the people the public-at-large knows about.
But there aren't that many famously-groundbreaking discoveries or inventions any more. The easy-pickings were widely explored before any of us were born.
Also: compared to a centuries past, corporations and colleges get the patents for the discoveries of their employees. The transistor was invented (sorry, history) 'at Bell labs'; Westinghouse 'pioneered alternating curent'; Stanford holds the patent for FM synthesis. The Galileos, Einsteins, Brahes, et. al. have been feudalized.
English speakers do the same thing. It's not as obvious when we stick two nouns together. We figure the first one is "acting as an adjective," and we can leave a space in between. It doesn't look wrong just because the first word is missing an inflected adjective ending.
Really, would it kill them to write "Anti-Vergangenheits-Bewältigung"?
I think we're missing the historical impact of rear-view thinking. While scientists were popular in their own day, they've almost become minor deities in the time since their lives. Of course our current scientists (who we can confirm are not dieties) are not awarded such importance.
Once humans discover (generations from now) the few truly earth-shattering ideas being posed now that we aren't even ready to understand, some of our generation will become 'rock stars' too.
What about Stephen Wolfram? His first physics paper was published when he was 15. He's fairly famous for his software company and his book "A New Kind of Science." By the way, some crazy crackpot has posted some amusing ideas at http://www.wolframscience.com NKS forum Applied Science. Some physicists might get a chuckle out of it.