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Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

> to be honest, he's probably not in the top 10 physicists of the 20th century

Who would you put in the top 10 ahead of him?

Without the 20th century restriction, she rants against the list "Einstein. Newton. Feynman."

She says, "The list should be: Newton, Maxwell, Einstein. The answer is Maxwell, if you're making this list, right? James Clerk Maxwell, his complete theory of electrodynamics, the best, most important thing to come out of the 1800s in physics. It's Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, okay? Like Feynman is great, but he's not up there. But in popular culture he is, because he's famous for being a famous physicist instead of being famous for his physics, which also, don't get me wrong, he did a lot of really good physics. I just think it's kind of weird."

I would agree that Maxwell belongs above Feynman if we're talking about modern physicists and not limiting ourselves to the 20th century.

What really amazes me is that Maxwell got as far as he did with the incredibly clunky notation he was using. Our modern notation, IIRC, is due to Heaviside, and was a huge improvement.

Let's see ... Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg, Bohm, Dirac, Schroedinger, de Broglie, Ehrenfest?

I'd put Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, and Dirac ahead of Feynman. I'm not so sure about the others; not that they weren't world class physicists, but so was Feynman.

Planck? His greatest achievements were a bit before the 20-th century.

Feynman also became active in physics right at the end of the heroic era. So he's disadvantaged by it.

If we're limiting to work actually done in the 20th century, yes, I agree Planck might not qualify because of the century boundary. And we also get to split hairs over whether 1900, when Planck published his quantum hypothesis, is in the 20th century or the 19th. :-)

Einstein for sure. For the rest: I'm not sure that they're clearly ahead of Feynman. I'm not sure they're behind, either. To me, they seem to kind of be in a cluster.

Apart from Einstein, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli, Bohr and Fermi are clearly ahead in depth and breadth of contribution. Post-war it's less clear, but IMO Steven Weinberg and Murray Gell Mann are probably greater.

Rutherford, planck , bohr jumpstarted the 20th century physics .

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