{"id":2886,"date":"2008-08-30T10:22:51","date_gmt":"2008-08-30T10:22:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/08\/30\/the-greatest-physicists\/"},"modified":"2008-08-30T10:22:51","modified_gmt":"2008-08-30T10:22:51","slug":"the-greatest-physicists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/08\/30\/the-greatest-physicists\/","title":{"rendered":"The Greatest Physicists"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over at Built om Facts, Matt is <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/builtonfacts\/2008\/08\/great_physicists_nominations.php\">working toward a Tope Ten list of physicists<\/a>. He says the top three are obvious, but he&#8217;s soliciting nominations for the rest.<\/p>\n<p>Back in the early days of this blog, I ran a poll for the <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/02\/top_eleven_time_to_vote.php\">greatest experiment in physics<\/a>, and there are worse places to start. Newton and Galileo are two of the obvious three (Einstein is the third), and I think Rutherford and Faraday absolutely belong on the list (Faraday gets bonus points for his interest in outreach to a wide audience). If you want to keep astronomy in with physics, Hubble belongs as well.<\/p>\n<p>Broadening things to include theorists, James Clerk Maxwell and Niels Bohr deserve spots. Feynman would be a pretty good choice, and I&#8217;d say Dirac probably belongs in that company as well.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s nine (not counting Hubble), leaving me one more choice. There are a lot of names still out there, though&#8211; Bardeen, Bell, Curie, Fermi, Heisenberg, Kelvin, Millikan, Planck, Rayleigh, Schr&ouml;dinger, Wheeler&#8211; and that&#8217;s without going much outside my own areas of physics. There are lots of high energy types out there that I haven&#8217;t even begun to try to sort out. Gell-Mann, anyone?<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a good question, and fun to think about. Who would you put in the all-time top ten?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over at Built om Facts, Matt is working toward a Tope Ten list of physicists. He says the top three are obvious, but he&#8217;s soliciting nominations for the rest. Back in the early days of this blog, I ran a poll for the greatest experiment in physics, and there are worse places to start. Newton&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/08\/30\/the-greatest-physicists\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Greatest Physicists<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2886\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}