{"id":4050,"date":"2009-09-04T09:54:00","date_gmt":"2009-09-04T09:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2009\/09\/04\/who-is-the-erdos-of-physics\/"},"modified":"2009-09-04T09:54:00","modified_gmt":"2009-09-04T09:54:00","slug":"who-is-the-erdos-of-physics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2009\/09\/04\/who-is-the-erdos-of-physics\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Is the Erdos of Physics?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Physics Buzz has a nice article about Paul Erdos<\/a> and the Erdos Number Project<\/a> (mine is 6), which ends with a good question:<\/p>\n

\n

I for one, am wondering: who would be the Paul Erd\u00c5\u0091s of the physics world?<\/i>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s a tough question, complicated further by the existence of really gigantic collaborations in experimental high-energy physics, where author lists can run to hundreds of people. The 511 collaborators that Erdos can boast is more impressive in math than in some fields of physics.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

For something really equivalent in spirit to Erdos, you would need to look for a physicist who had a long and distinguished career, and who worked in a wide range of fields, so that they might reasonably be connected to physicists in lots of different areas. These days, that would probably mean a theorist, as experimental skills in most fields are highly specialized, and you don’t get a lot of field-switching. Theoretical methods, though, are pretty similar in different fields, so you can get people who make contributions in, say, solid state physics and particle physics both.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure who a good modern candidate would be. Within my own field of AMO physics, somebody like Peter Zoller<\/a> or Paul Julienne<\/a> might work, as they’ve done a little bit of everything. I don’t know if you could easily connect them to particle physics, though. Ed Witten is the dominant figure in high-energy theory (or so it seems from the outside), but I don’t know if he’s a prolific collaborator.<\/p>\n

Going back a bit, I. I. Rabi<\/a> is somebody who might work, as he did important work in both atomic and nuclear physics. A lot of his connections to people were more administrative in nature than the sort of thing that would lead to co-authorship. John Wheeler<\/a> is another possibility.<\/p>\n

It’s a tough question. So I’ll just throw it out there: If you were going to establish an Erdos-number equivalent for physics, who would you use?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Physics Buzz has a nice article about Paul Erdos and the Erdos Number Project (mine is 6), which ends with a good question: I for one, am wondering: who would be the Paul Erd\u00c5\u0091s of the physics world? It’s a tough question, complicated further by the existence of really gigantic collaborations in experimental high-energy physics,… Continue reading Who Is the Erdos of Physics?<\/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":[8,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4050","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=4050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4050\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}