If you could have a science lesson...

[Angrboda]

I probably wouldn't pick a physical scientist. If I had to pick, it would likely be a mathematician or a logician. If I have to narrow the field, I'd choose either Saul Kripke or Kurt Godel. I'd learn more from Kripke than anyone else, but the learning isn't the sole attraction. Other possibilities: Alfred Tarski, Gottlob Frege, W.V.O. Quine, Daniel Dennett, David Hume, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michel Foucault, Georg Cantor, David Hilbert, Alfred Turing, Heraclitus, Democritus, Diogenes, Pythagoras, Sappho, Hypatia, Zoroaster, Confucius, Lao Tzu or Chuang Tse. There are a lot of historical thinkers who I'd love an intense one-to-one experience with. If I did it for the physical sciences, it'd be in cosmology or astrophysics; probably Roger Penrose or David Bohm. Both are brilliant, and both have beliefs that I'm fundamentally at odds with, and both could teach me about the nature of the universe as a whole. (I disagree with Penrose's philosophy of mind, and Bohm's attachment to hidden variable theory.)

(ETA: Oh, and I'd give my eye-teeth just to have lunch with Emmy Noether.)