Greatest Physicists

Greatest Physicists #1 - Isaac Newton The first and greatest physicist in my estimation is Isaac Newton, born in 1643. Lots of commenters absolutely correctly picked out Newton for the top spot, and had I picked anyone else (with the just barely plausible alternatives of Einstein or Galileo (and see his honorable mention for details)) I'd have been justifiably thought to be nuts. Before Newton, there was no physics. There was science, but a systematic mathematical description of the laws of nature did not exist. Indeed it could not exist, mathematics itself had not yet developed to the…

#2 - Albert Einstein Einstein. When a person's name and photograph are both literal synonyms for genius, it's a pretty good sign they're among the greatest of the greats. But even if Einstein had not become the popular legend which lives on to this day, he'd still tower above the science of physics. In one year - his annus mirabilis of 1905 - he wrote four papers, any of which would have cemented his reputation in the canon of the great physicists. The first was an analysis of Brownian motion. If you drop a pollen grain into a glass of water and look very closely with a microscope, you'll…

#3 - James Clerk Maxwell James Clerk Maxwell is my favorite physicist. This site takes its name from a wise thing he once said: "In every branch of knowledge the progress is proportional to the amount of facts on which to build, and therefore to the facility of obtaining data." For all the volumes written about the philosophy of science, that sums it up pretty well. Is it built on observable facts and empirical data? If so, it's science. Otherwise it's not. Anyone, however, can come up with a clever thing to say. Almost no one in history has come up with as many brilliant…

#4 - Michael Faraday One day sir, you may tax it. - Michael Faraday, asked by the British Minister of Finance about the practical value of electricity With Michael Faraday we begin to reach the most rarified heights of physics achievement. Faraday worked largely in the first half of the 19th century when the lines between physics and the other sciences were not as clearly drawn. Faraday blazed a trail of glory through the rapidly developing sciences of physics and chemistry. In his early years as a scientist he built the first primitive electric motor, discovered electromagnetic induction…

#5 - Richard Feynman I'm probably going to take some flack for this one. Feynman was and is so popular as a scientific writer, raconteur, and honest-to-goodness celebrity that his staggering scientific accomplishments are sometimes lost in the shadow of his own popular legend. But if we want to try to make a more-or-less honest ranking of the top ten, we have to give him the vast credit he deserves. Feynman got his start as a physicist in roughly the most dramatic way possible. Pulled fresh out of Princeton in the middle of the Second World War, he was assigned as one of the thousands of…

#6 - Ernest Rutherford The New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford was an incubator of genius, and a genius himself. His position on this list is probably a little unorthodox as he wasn't a very flashy scientist and he wasn't a theoretical wizard. He just happened to be a surpassingly great physicist anyway. When Rutherford started his work in the late 1800s, modern physics was still quite new. Classical mechanics had been fleshed out reasonably well, but relativity and quantum mechanics didn't exist, and the world of the microscopic was very poorly understood. The very concept that…

#7 - Erwin Schrodinger Schroedinger, Erwin! Professor of physics! Wrote daring equations! Confounded his critics! That's the first couple of lines of Cecil Adams' brilliant epic poem about Schrodinger's cat. Why does Schrodinger deserve an epic poem? Because he's the 7th greatest physicist, that's why. Schrodinger was born in Austria in 1877. Looking back we can see that such a placement is a bit ominous, but war has rarely prevented science from moving forward. Quite the opposite, usually. He achieved his habilitation in 1914, and spent the next four years as an artillary officer. It…

#8 - Paul Dirac Dirac was a physicist of incredible brilliance even by the standards of the great physicists. You can't turn a corner in quantum physics without bumping into something he discovered. Solve the ubiquitous and vitally important quantum harmonic oscillator problem using the wave equation method and you'll get a complicated and not especially enlightening differential equation and its solution. Solve it using the elegant and clear operator method and you'll have taken a first step into a larger and richer view of the quantum world. Dirac was the first one to notice that this…

#9 - J.J. Thomson The entire edifice of chemistry is a theme and variation on the study of the properties of atomic electrons. Tremendous sections of physics, from solid state to quantum optics to AMO and beyond hings almost entirely on electron behavior. Astrophysics, spectroscopy, and large chunks of high energy physics rely on the understanding of the electron. And those are just the leading edge of what the electron means to modern science. More than anyone else, we owe J.J. Thomson for what we know about the electron. No one knew for sure that there was any such thing as an electron…

#10: Wolfgang Pauli Wolfgang Pauli was once asked to critique a paper of questionable merit. As he is said to have put it, "This is not right. It is not even wrong." It was a good and concise statement of what physics requires - not merely interesting ideas, but ones that are both grounded in experimental reality and theoretical rigor. Ideas which don't do both are not even wrong. There's even a a physics book in the popular press today titled after Pauli's quote, making the titular claim about string theory. But of course snappy quotes won't get a scientist on the top ten list. Pauli…

Remember the post a while back where we tried to come up with a list of the 10 greatest physicists? I've been thinking and rearranging and I think I've come up with a list I'm reasonably happy with. There are quite a few great physicists I'm not happy at all about having to leave out, but 10 is a small number and no matter which ten are picked there's at least ten more who have some good cause to feel left out. The criteria is the importance of their contribution to physics, not just their raw brilliance. To make up for those left out, I'm including a number of unordered Honorable Mentions…