There are many heroes and heroines of whom most do not know their names. They are not in the limelight like Galileo Galilei, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein and yet they are brilliant minds whose fantastic ideas helped change the world.
Three scientists, Alfred Wegener, Milutin Milankovitch and Vladimir Köppen, are a good example of this. His work had a profound impact on our vision and understanding of the world and the climate. Unfortunately, these days they are little known.
Wegener, Milankovitch, and Köppen produced groundbreaking individual and specific research, but the fruits of their collaboration led to the production of general global theories that underpin much of earth and climate science today. Vladimir Köppen’s global climate classification, the basis for most systems currently in use, combined meteorology, climatology, and botany, making plants a primary indicator of climate categories and regions. Wegener created the theory of continental drift which provides the basis for geophysics and understanding of earthquakes and volcanic activity. Milutin Milankovitch, a Serbian mathematician and climatologist, combined the effects of changes in Sun / Earth relationships to determine their role in varying the amount of energy reaching Earth and causing climate change.
His ideas challenged prevailing scientific opinions and provided a framework for various patterns and evidence, but did not identify the underlying mechanisms. It is similar to the fact that Charles Darwin knew nothing about the underlying role of genetics in biological evolution.
In the field of women, we all know Marie Curie, but how many famous scientists from past centuries would you be able to name? And what were your discoveries?
For most, the answer would be quite short. Unfortunately, women have been very underrepresented in the world of science and this does not mean that the reason was because they did not make any discoveries at all, but because their discoveries have been almost forgotten due to their counterparts. male.
Sexism in science is not a problem of the same caliber today, although there is still a large gap to bridge.
The truth is that many women scientists in the past were not given the credit they deserved for their discoveries, which were truly innovative: making observations, proposing hypotheses, testing experiments and doing all the hard work resulted in being stripped of it solely for your gender.
Today we remember all those women and men forgotten by history.
