Who is the greatest chemist of all time?
Spoiler: you said it was Marie Curie. But how we define greatness matters
Everyone wants to know who’s the best. Human achievement is built on league tables and rankings, healthy competition or historic inspiration. We like to pretend that we don’t really care about anyone else, but our entire way of life is built on superlatives. We want to know the biggest, the fastest, the most important. It’s a way to see how we’re stacking up, a way to motivate ourselves and learn how to improve. And when it comes to the elite group of humans who have left a lasting legacy, it’s also fun to put their contributions in context. Ranking them helps us remember what has come before, organises our minds to look at the greater picture, and rekindles inspiration with tales of heroes and villains.
That’s why, in early November, I decided to hold a competition to pick the greatest chemist of all time. It was supposed to be just a bit of fun; greatness, after all, is pretty hard to define – it’s just a vague concept of being a little bit better than ‘pretty good’. Somehow, it spiralled into something a bit more than that.