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Top Ten Physicists

Updated: Jan 17, 2022

I saw the results of two polls about the top-ten physicists in history. Can you guess the names in the lists? Was Richard Feynman on the lists? If so, what was his ranking?


Isaac Newton on a German stamp


They conducted one of the polls at Physics World magazine of the Institute of Physics (IOP), the British professional organization of physicists, to celebrate its 125th anniversary in 1999 [Ref. 1]. The other was of PhysicsWeb, another publication by IOP on the web [Ref. 2]. We can extract one more top-ten list from John Simmons's book [Ref. 3], which ranks 100 most influential scientists from the past to the present.


The three lists are combined in the table below.


Table 1. Three lists of top-ten physicists combined

Ranking

PhysicsWeb survey

Physics World survey

Simmons

1

Isaac Newton

​Albert Einstein

Isaac Newton

2

Albert Einstein

Isaac Newton

Albert Einstein

3

James Clerk Maxwell

James Clerk Maxwell

Niels Bohr

4

Galileo Galilei

Niels Bohr

Galileo Galilei

5

Paul Dirac

Werner Heisenberg

Johannes Kepler

6

Niels Bohr

Galileo Galilei

Nicolaus Copernicus

7

Max Planck

Richard Feynman

Michael Faraday

8

Richard Feynman

Paul Dirac, Erwin Schrödinger

James Clerk Maxwell

9

Michael Faraday

Werner Heisenberg

10

Erwin Schrödinger

Ernest Rutherford

Erwin Schrödinger

We see a total of fourteen physicists in Table 1. Physicists appearing in all three lists are Newton, Einstein, Maxwell, Galilei, Bohr, and Schrödinger. Those in two lists are Dirac, Feynman, Faraday, and Heisenberg. Those in one list are Planck, Rutherford, Kepler, and Copernicus. Among the physicists of the 20th century, the number of theorists is overwhelmingly more than experimentalists.


PhysicsWeb also gives the names that followed the top ten. Among those, physicists not included in the other top ten lists are as follows: Ludwig Boltzmann, Enrico Fermi, Archimedes, Stephen Hawking, Lev Landau, J. J. Thomson, Marie Curie, Lord Rayleigh, Aristotle, Wolfgang Pauli, John Bardeen, Edwin Hubble, Charles Townes, and Abdus Salam.


In the ranking by Simmons, Schrödinger, 10th among physicists, is 18th among all the fields of science; and Feynman, the 52nd. We should note that all these lists are biased to the Western world, though it is true that there are not many candidates in the Eastern world.


Girls and boys, be ambitious to place your own name on such a list next time!


By the way, after writing the original version of this post, a good book that tells about thirty great physicists appeared [Ref. 4].


References (As for 1 and 2, see also Note 2 below)

  1. Physics World, December issue (1999); cited by Physics News Update, No. 459 (1999).

  2. PhysicsWeb News, November issue (1999).

  3. J. Simmons, The Scientific 100; A Ranking of the Most Influential Scientists, Past and Present (Carol Publishing Group, Secaucus, 1996).

  4. W. H. Cropper, Great Physicists: the Life and Time of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001).


Notes added to the revised version

  1. This article originally appeared at https://ideaisaac.blogspot.com/1999/12/top-ten-physicists.html on Dec 5, 1999, and has been one of the most viewed posts of the present author (3.31-k views). In the version given here, he made editorial changes and improved English.

  2. The original post did not quote the URLs of the news articles mentioned in Refs. 1 and 2. On the occasion of the revision, I have found the related URLs at the Physics World site of IOP publishing:

The latter site gives the top five physicists in the first paragraph. The second paragraph compares the rank 1 physicist of the PhysicsWeb poll with that of Physics World. The table at the bottom seems to have given the top ten physicists of both surveys. However, it probably suffered damage when PhysicsWeb changed its look in 2001


Appendix A


The table below shows the main achievements of the fourteen great physicists in Table 1, arranged by order of the birth year.


Table A. Achievements of great physicists

Name

Years lived in

Nationality

Achievement

Copernicus, Nicolaus

1473–1543

Polish

heliocentric model of planet motion

Galileo (Galileo Galilei)

1564–1642​

Italian

law of free fall; principle of inertia​

Kepler, Johannes

1571–1630​

German

laws of planet motion

Newton, Isaac

1642–1727​

British

laws of motion and gravity

Faraday, Michael

1791–1867

British

electromagnetic induction​

Maxwell, James Clerk

1831–1879

British

unification of electricity and magnetism

Planck, Max

1858–1947

German

discovery of elementary quantum

Rutherford, Ernest

1871–1937

New Zealander

discovery of the atomic nucleus


Einstein, Albert

1879–1955

German/Swiss/American

special and general theories of relativity; law of photoelectric effect​

Bohr, Niels

1885–1962

Danish

quantum theory of atoms

Schrödinger, Erwin

1887–1961

Austrian

quantum wave mechanics

Heisenberg, Werner

1901–1976

​German

quantum matrix mechanics and uncertainty principle

Dirac, Paul

1902–1984

British

relativistic quantum theory; prediction of antimatter​

Feynman, Richard

1918–1988

American

development of quantum electrodynamics

Appendix B


The Observer–the Guardian has a weekly series, “The 10 best ...” At the earlier stage of this series, the following article appeared:


Robin McKie, “The 10 best physicists: From subatomic to cosmic, the pick of the pioneers.” The Guardian (May 12, 2013) [https://www.theguardian.com/culture/gallery/2013/may/12/the-10-best-physicists].


Physicists chosen in the above article are as follows:

  • Isaac Newton

  • Niels Bohr

  • Galileo Galilei

  • Albert Einstein

  • James Clerk Maxwell

  • Michael Faraday

  • Marie Curie

  • Richard Feynman

  • Ernest Rutherford

  • Paul Dirac

You can see large portraits of and about 100 words of explanations of these physicists at the link above.

Leaving a comment in the thread, the reader can give them a suggestion to be included in their alternative reader-generated series. The article about the alternative series appeared soon later:


Observer and Guardian readers, “Readers suggest the 10 best ... physicist,” The Guardian (May 15, 2013) [https://www.theguardian.com/culture/gallery/2013/may/15/readers-10-best-physicists].


The abstract of this article reads:


Last week we [brought] you our 10 best physicists. Here we present your thoughts on who really deserved to [be on] the list — from Archimedes to Lise Meitner and a fictional addition.


Physicists suggested are as follows:

  • Archimedes

  • Nikola Tesla

  • Max Planck

  • Werner Heisenberg

  • Lise Meitner

  • Zefram Cochrane

  • Erwin Schrödinger

  • Lord Kelvin

  • Ludwig Boltzmann

  • Wolfgang Pauli

Can you guess which physicist is a fictional character?


The answer is Zefram Cochrane (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zefram_Cochrane about him).

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