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)
Physics World, December issue (1999); cited by Physics News Update, No. 459 (1999).
PhysicsWeb News, November issue (1999).
J. Simmons, The Scientific 100; A Ranking of the Most Influential Scientists, Past and Present (Carol Publishing Group, Secaucus, 1996).
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
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.
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:
Ref. 1: "Physics: past, present, future" (Dec 6, 1999) https://physicsworld.com/a/physics-past-present-future/
Ref. 2: "Newton tops PhysicsWeb poll" (Nov 29, 1999) https://physicsworld.com/a/newton-tops-physicsweb-poll/
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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