British Science - Peter Higgs wins a Nobel prize (university, electric)

[Cruithne]

Massive congratulations to Peter Higgs and Francois Englert for winning their nobel prizes today.
Acknowledgements also to Gerald Guralnik, Tom Kibble and Carl Hagen - also made key contributions to the theory of the Higgs field and Higgs Boson.

BBC News - Higgs boson scientists win Nobel prize in physics

Lets be proud and acknowledge some of the achievements of British scientific discoveries, inventions and contributions to the world today.

Here are a few others:

Isaac Newton - Gravity
Charles Darwin - Evolution
Stephen Hawking - Cosmology
Michael Faraday - Electric motor
Francis Crick and James Watson - DNA
Rosalind Franklin - DNA RNA
Paul Dirac - Quantum mechanics
Ernest Rutherford - Nuclear Physics
Alexander Graham Bell - Inventor of the telephone
William Herchel - Astronomy
Tim Berners-Lee - Inventor of the World Wide Web
Thomas Huxley - Biology
James Clerk Maxwell - Electromagnetism
Francis Bacon - The scientific method
Humphrey Davy - Chemistry
Alan Turing - Computer science and code breaker

And many many others...

[Jezer]

We do have a great heritage of pure and applied research in the UK.

Fascinating list and some outstanding names there, though if I'm going to be picky James Watson is American and Rutherford was born in New Zealand.

I worked in medical research many moons ago and our director of research, John Vane, got the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (no typo). I'm quite chuffed to say that I did a tiny tiny bit of work for their unit.

For a while James Black worked at the research labs and he later got the Nobel Prize for Medicine, having been responsible for the development of beta blockers and H2 blockers- two of the most widely used drugs in the world.

[travric]

Kudos to Mr. Higgs for pushing science to a 'next step'. A brilliant man no doubt whenn it comes to quantum life. Question is how does he feel about his discovery being termed the so-called 'God'-particle? No doubt science practioners cringe with that appellation!

[paull805]

Penicillin

[Cruithne]

These too:

John Logie Baird - Inventor of the television (for some reason I thought he was American)
Charles Babbage - First mechanical computer
Joseph Swan - Incandescent light bulb
James Blundell - Blood transfusion
Patrick Steptoe + Robert Edwards - IVF
Florence Nightingale - Modern nursing
Henry Cavendish - Discovery of Hydrogen
Antony Hewish - Discovery of pulsars
Christopher Cockerell - Inventor of the hovercraft

[Jezer]

Originally Posted by paull805

Penicillin

Interesting one there.

Fleming discovered it but abandoned it after having problems getting it in sufficient concentration.

Florey (Australian) and Chain (German) who were both at Oxford University got things to the next level by producing penicillin in significant quantities. They, together with Fleming, received the Nobel Prize.

[paull805]

Originally Posted by Jezer

Interesting one there.

Fleming discovered it but abandoned it after having problems getting it in sufficient concentration.

Florey (Australian) and Chain (German) who were both at Oxford University got things to the next level by producing penicillin in significant quantities. They, together with Fleming, received the Nobel Prize.

LOL

I didn't say who got it on to the mass market, I meant discovered.

[Jezer]

Can't help it- it's just an interest of mine.

There was massive pressure to mass produce the drug once WWII started.