Darwin/Dawkins/Thaller/Sagan

Science is not my religion and to quote Bunny Johnson when Bob Marley died... "I keep no altar for fallen generals".

Rachel Carlson
Mother of the ecology movement.
Sounded the alarm

Michelson and Morley, the inventors of interferometry which blew the ether theory to kingdom come.
Lise Meitner She worked with Otto Hahn 0 uclear fisson.; Was denied the the Nobel Prize in 1944 because she was Jewish.
Richard Feynman because he made me laugh
Isaac Newton
Faraday - discovering by doing- I would have loved to work in his lab.

Not thought of as a scientist, but surprised I havent seen Leonardo DaVinci in the list. Looking at some of his inventions and reading about some of his life's work, I can't help but think of him as a hero. Of course, I would also include Tesla, Sagan, Darwin, Hawkings, Galileo, and Einstein. I knew one of the physicists who worked on the Polio vacine and would include Salk as well. There was also a little known woman who developed a treatment for Polio before the vacine came to be. She was an Australian nurse who came to the US and although her treatments worked, the orthopedic surgeons of the time refused to accept her methods because they were not like the accepted procedures of the day. Her name was Sister Elizabeth Kenny and her story is fascinating.

Richard Feynman's autobiographical memoir "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" is perhaps the most entertaining book I have ever read. And Feynman was serious about love. After getting his PhD from Princeton, he married his high school sweetheart Arline Greenbaum in spite of the fact that she was dying of tuberculosis.

Mr. Wizard