Greatest physicists of all time

[Abby Normal]

I got (in order):

1. Newton
2. Einstein
3. Maxwell

Then further down:

4. Bohr
5. Dirac
6. Shrodinger
7. Heisenberg
8. Pauli
9. Feynman
10. Witten/Galileo(tie)


Who you think?

[GUT]

I THINK that I'd swap one and two.

[Svensson]

me as well. Newton wrote his laws based on observation and mathematics. Einstein on the other hand introduced completely new concepts based on thought experiments alone.

I'd also bump Galileo higher up the ladder as he literally revolutionised the geocentrist views at the time and stuck to his guns even when his work got him into hot water with the authorities. Not only was he very clever, he had onehelluva spine, I think.

[Robert]

I'd say that Einstein was a greater scientist than Newton while Newton was a greater mathematician than Einstein.

[Robert]

I must mention Marie Curie, who won TWO Nobel prizes and paid for her work with her life.

[Steadmund Brand]

I think Carl Sagan has to make the list just for making physics palatable to the non scientist....he did more for science education (in America anyway) than any other great physicist....plus I got to meet him once

Also, no list can be complete without Charles Darwin... sorry creationists....this one you don't win!!!

Steadmund Brand

[Abby Normal]

yeah. I go back and forth between Newton and Einstein-but I keep newton number one. The father of physics, Gravity, invented calculus/mechanics/trig, all his other work optics etc. hes the man.

also, I got Witten and Gallileo tied at ten, but any number of other great physicists could go there.

Question-whos the greatest French physicist? Curie, De Broglie, Laplace, lagrange, poincarre??

[Mayerling]

God this is hard. I was mediocre at best in the sciences in school (and didn't take any courses in college - we could take philosophy and logic courses instead). As an adult I started looking more closely into it.

Newton and Einstein have to tie for first spot.

Abby's choice of James Clark Maxwell was an interesting one. His work on electro magnetism was vital for modern technology. Certainly he and Lord Kelvin vie for greatest scientist of Victorian England, but so would Faraday.

I would have made a space in the top twenty for some figures who are somewhat discredited today, but who did yeoman work at the start - most significantly Aristotle, whose views made (and, I freely admit, marred) world science until the 15th Century. If this was medicine Hippocrates and Galen would have been in it, despite the latter's errors, and if it was astrology I'd have included Claudio Ptolemy for his long impact (despite his major error) regarding an earth centered universe - of course he is below Copernicus.

Top 10 modern physicists (1830 - 2017):

Albert Einstein
James Clark Maxwell
Niels Bohr
Enrico Fermi
Sir John Thompson
Sir Ernest Rutherford
Michael Faraday (a bit of a cheat as one can make a case for him in "Chemistry" instead)
Lord Kelvin (despite his boner about man will never be able to fly)
Richard Feynman

Honorable mention:
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Leo Szillard
Werner

[Mayerling]

Werner was supposed to be Werner Heisenberg

[Abby Normal]

Niels Bohr walks into a bar. The bartender asks-"what'll you have?" Bohr responds "Probably a beer."

[Abby Normal]

Heisenberg walks into a bar. Bartender asks-"what'll you have?" Heisenberg says-"I don't know."

[Sam Flynn]

The barman says "We don't serve tachyons here". A tachyon walks into a bar.

A neutrino walks into a bar. The barman says, "I'm sorry, we don't serve neutrinos here", and the neutrino replies "That's all right, I'm just passing through".

[Sam Flynn]

I'm finding it difficult to come up with a list, but I've already excluded Wolfgang Pauli.

[Abby Normal]

The barman says "We don't serve tachyons here". A tachyon walks into a bar.

A neutrino walks into a bar. The barman says, "I'm sorry, we don't serve neutrinos here", and the neutrino replies "That's all right, I'm just passing through".

LOL! My father in law told me the tachyon one before.

[GUT]

I'd say that Einstein was a greater scientist than Newton while Newton was a greater mathematician than Einstein.

Newton may well have been the greatest mathematician of all time, in my opinion.