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Greatest living physicist?

Tez

Graduate Poster
Tez
Joined
Nov 29, 2001
Messages
1,104
Who is the greatest physicist alive today?

(And no, its not Hawking - he doesnt rank in the top 100 by any academic impact factor!)

Sure, "greatest" is somewhat subjective - however there's a pretty unanimous consensus amongst physicists. Since the person in question shuns publicity, his name will never be a household word...

To estimate his impact on physics, he has been cited around 25,000 times to date... Consider that the next most cited physicist has only about 3/5 of this number - and almost all of the next 9 in the top 10 work in fields such as semiconductors, superconductivity etc which have much a much larger population of researchers...

Twice I have asked famous physicists what they were working on and received the reply "I'm just trying to understand what X is thinking about now.." or words to that effect...
 
Muah

I just finished re-reading The Elegant Universe and from what Brian Green said I would be guessing Ed Witten.
 
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Witten.html

about Edward Witten:

Although he is definitely a physicist (as his list of publications clearly shows) his command of mathematics is rivalled by few mathematicians, and his ability to interpret physical ideas in mathematical form is quite unique. Time and again he has surprised the mathematical community by his brilliant application of physical insight leading to new and deep mathematical theorems.

In his study of these areas of theoretical physics, Witten has achieved a level of mathematics which has led him to be awarded the highest honour that a mathematician can receive, namely a Fields Medal.

etc.
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Re: Muah

Dylab said:
I just finished re-reading The Elegant Universe and from what Brian Green said I would be guessing Ed Witten.
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From http://online.itp.ucsb.edu/online/plecture/witten/
In the last few years, physicists have learned that the different string theories discovered and studied in different ways are limiting cases of a single, more powerful theory, known as M theory. "M" stands for magic, mystery, or matrix, according to taste. Some of these developments will be explained in this lecture.

Edward Witten, professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., is arguably the premier theoretical physicist of our time. Renowned for his many contributions to particle physics and string theory, Witten has almost single-handedly constructed a new branch of mathematical physics For his achievements, he has been awarded mathematics' highest prize, the 1990 Fields Medal. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, he is a recipient of a MacArthur Prize, the Dirac Medal, and many other honors.
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Sounds like you nailed it.
 
There's Steven Weinberg, who is credited with unifying the weak and electromagnetic forces, but what has he done lately?
 
Yep - Witten is the chappie I was thinking of...

As for Gell-Mann, I doubt he'd rank better than the top 30 or 40. [He also doesnt understand Bell's theorem, which annoys me.] To be fair - he did give a nice talk at some conference I was at a few
months ago; no new physics, but challenging the orthodox view of where physics is and should be heading.

Weinberg is very good - but he's old and so recently hasnt been so productive.

Witten is in his 50's and is still devastating.
 
RichardR said:
How would John Wheeler rate? Assuming he is still alive. ;)
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Yeah - he's still going (well, as of last year when I saw him at a conference in his honour, and he sure wasnt going anywhere fast!)

He's pretty high on the creativity scale, thats for sure....
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
Has Witten written anything a normal person could read?

~~Paul
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I think he has a joint article with someone in Physics Today from 5 or so years ago.

Some things - like that talk garys_2k posted a link to - have much that is intelligible.

Mostly people agree that his time shouldnt be wasted on this stuff - there's a lot of very smart physicists out there who basically act as interpreters for what EW is saying. Then those people get interpreted by yet more physicists - thats the stage that I start understanding it!
 
LucyR said:
I would have guessed Witten. How high does 't Hooft rank?
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t'Hooft would rank very high - in top 20.

The thing that bugs me about t'Hooft is that, until about 18 months ago, he too didnt understand Bell's theorem - the only aspect of current physics I'm positive will still be considered interesting and fundamental in 300 years time.

This was obvious from one of his papers. At a conference banquet I confronted him about it - and we talked at cross purposes for about 10 minutes. I got nowhere.

Then, about a year after this, a colleague of mine, Richard Gill, persisted - and finally managed to explain it to him (t'Hooft had been writing nonsense about local determinism at the Planck scale).

Gill says that t'Hoofts uncle (van Kampen), a famous physicist in his own right, had told him when he was young that Bell's theorem was based on counter-factual reasoning (asking "what would have been the outcome if I had done something different") and thus was irrelevant for real physics. Nothing could be further from the truth!

Anyone can "understand" Bell's theorem, if they're prepared to put in half an hour of thought. I put a simple version in the "entanglement" thread on this forum.
 
It's interesting that all the suggestions have been theorists!

What about the best experimentalist? To be honest I haven't got a clue who I would choose...
 
Brian the Snail said:
It's interesting that all the suggestions have been theorists!

What about the best experimentalist? To be honest I haven't got a clue who I would choose...
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That's a tough one with today's high energy experiments having sometimes hundreds of colaborators.
 
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