Who is the world's greatest living physicist?

[Loopydude]

While I think Edward Witten is a natural choice, being essentially the inventor of M-Theory and all, and the initiator of the “Second Superstring Revolution”.

Thing is, either Superstring/M-Theory is the TOE, or it’s a gigantic waste of time, and the jury is still very much out on that one. Same goes for Loop Quantum Gravity, Non-Commutative Geometry, Twistor-Theory, etc., etc., etc. There’s a whole crop of mighty minds out there getting some of the theoretical spotlight, but the theories are way, perhaps hopelessly, ahead of experimental confirmation. Therefore it’s hard to see what the likes of Witten will really contribute, in the long run, to our understanding of nature. It’s not enough to be clever; you also have to be right.

So I nominate some folks who have expanded our testable horizons:

Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig, for the fundamentals of what has come to be called Quantum Chromodynamics (Zweig, tragically, was nearly run out of the profession for his theory about “Aces”, which he developed idependently from Gell-Mann’s quark theory, and was quite similar in its details; he gets little credit for the accomplishmet).

Alan Guth and Andrei Linde, for the invention and critical refinements of the theory of Cosmic Inflation, respectively. Basically, inflation put some of the finishing touches on the Hot Big Bang theory, and resolved nearly all of the seeming paradoxes that plagued the pre-Inflation Big Bang. Thus far Inflation has proven wildly sucessful at predicting cosmic observations, and it’s likely to rack up more successes in the near future.

I predict the next great living physicist(s) will not be working on a TOE like M-Theory, or some variant of quantum gravity, but will help us determine in a testable way where Inflation came from, and relate it to Dark Matter and Dark Energy.

[Moe_Mentum]

From more of an experimentalist point of view, Penzias and Wilson might be worth considering for their discovery of the cosmic microwave background radtion. That certainly had a profound effect on our understanding of the origins of the universe.

Jack Kilby might be another name worth mentioning, given that whole internet revolution thing that happened in the 1990’s.

I guess it all depends on your definition of “greatest”.

[SentientMeat]

From more of an experimentalist point of view, Penzias and Wilson might be worth considering for their discovery of the cosmic microwave background radtion.

Bill Bryson, in A Short History of Everything, tells their story with much wit and charm. They had trouble eliminating noise from their receiver, and tried all kinds of daft ways to do so without having any idea what the interference was. The real brains were elsewhere in Princeton under Robert Dicke, although none of these people had read the paper by the real real brains: George Gamow.

Although Penzias and Wilson had not been looking for cosmic background radiation, didn’t know what it was when they had found it, and hadn’t described or interpreted its character in any paper, they received the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics. The Princeton researchers got only sympathy. According to Dennis Overbye in Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, neither Penzias nor Wilson altogether understood the significance of what they had found until they read about it in the New York Times.

[Moe_Mentum]

SentientMeat Thanks for the link. I was aware of many of the details of this story, including the fact that Penzias and Wilson were at first unaware of the significance of their discovery.

The Nobel Prize web site puts a slightly spin on the same events.

It was already known that the intensity of cosmic microwaves decreases with decreasing wavelength; hence, the intensity at 7 centimeters would be expected to be quite low. However, to their surprise, Penzias and Wilson found a comparatively high intensity. They suspected at first that this radiation must originate either in the instrument or in the atmosphere. However, by painstaking testing, they showed that it came from outer space and that its intensity was the same in all directions. Hence, their measurements allowed the surprising conclusion that the universe is filled uniformly with microwave radiation.

These two researchers made no suggestions about the origin of this mysterious radiation.

While serendipity played a major role in this discovery, I don’t think it diminishes its significance or the hard work of the people making the measurements and trying to interpret them. I think most people in similar circumstances would have just thrown up their hands in frustration and called in quits, and I don’t think Bryson gives them enough credit for sticking with it until they figured out what was going on.

[MikeS]

My perspective is that of someone working in General Relativity, so it won’t exactly be objective, but here goes:

A lot has been said about Steven Hawking here. He’s a damn good physicist, but it’s hard at this point to disentangle that from his celebrity status (witness the media attention to his recent announcement in Dublin.) From my perspective, he was one of about a half-dozen people who revitalized the field of GR in the 60-70s, most of whom are still alive, and it would be hard to pick any one of them as “the greatest.” (Among them: Bob Geroch, Roger Penrose, John Wheeler, Charles Misner, Bryce DeWitt. I would probably include Bob Wald in there as well, but I’m doubly biased in his case because he’s my advisor.) In fact, I would throw in John Wheeler as a dark-horse candidate for the title, if only because he was the advisor for half of the above people plus Richard Feynman.

Ed Witten deserves mad props for what he’s done, and from what I can tell all the string theorists and particle physicists downstairs are in awe of him. I think that there’s a general consensus (at least around here) that Witten is the greatest living particle theorist, which certainly makes him a candidate for capo di tutti capi of the physics world. That said, I think it’s unlikely that he’ll get a Nobel Prize for the simple reason that he’s likely to pass away before string theory will ever be experimentally tested. (And he’s in his mid-fifties now.)

[Silocke]

Either Maria Spirolu or John Button of Leictershire

[Hyperelastic]

@tim314

Well, I think a lot of those are historical references, like “the greatest living physicist in 1920 was Albert Einstein.” In fact, I think a lot of the reason that number is so great is that there was once a definite consesus as to the identity of the greatest living physicist. Whereas perhaps there never was as much consensus for chemistry.

Try eliminating results containing Einstein’s name.
If you google: “greatest living physicist” -Einstein
you get only 24 hits.

It drops to 13 if you also eliminate Hawking, which is odd because he is not even a consensus choice for the greatest living physicist right now. But I suppose he is by far the most famous physicist living in the world today.

I’m not sure what that proves. I get 1110 hits for “greatest home-run hitter”, 645 for “greatest home-run hitter” -ruth, and 504 for “greatest home-run hitter” -ruth -aaron. That doesn’t explain why people care about the greatest home-run hitter but not about the greatest double hitter (zero hits). In that case, the explanation is that home runs are more valuable and exciting than doubles, but in the physics vs. chemistry case, I see no similar explanation.

Besides, Einstein and Hawking are probably mentioned in every discussion of who the greatest physicist is, if only as a counterpoint to who the person really thinks the greatest physicist is.