Top Eleven: Early Returns

A preliminary report on the standings in the Greatest Physics Experiment voting:


  • Michelson-Morley: 13
  • Faraday: 7 (including one vote in the Farady post)
  • Roemer: 5
  • Aspect: 4.5 (one indecisive person voted for both Cavendish and Aspect)
  • Galileo: 3
  • Rutherford: 3
  • Cavendish: 1.5
  • Hertz: 1 (in the comments to the Hertz post)

Newton, Hubble, and Mössbauer are currently getting shut out.

Voting will remain open for another couple of days, so if you're a backer of somebody other than Michelson and Morley, you've still got time for a late charge: round up some friends, and get out the vote.

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The votes are in, and have been carefully tabulated by our bleary-eyed accounting firm (that is, me-- I would've posted last night, but I went to see Chuck D speak (because I'm down with the old-school rap), and he went on for more than two hours...) . What looked like a runaway victory for…
The Top Eleven is now complete. Here's the full list of experiments, with links to my summaries:Galileo Galilei: ~1610: Discovery of the moons of Jupiter, and measurements of the acceleration of falling objects.Ole Roemer ~1675: Measurement of the speed of light by timing the eclipses of Io.Isaac…
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Today is the last day to vote in Cosmic Variance's Greatest Physics Paper contest. If you haven't voted yet, go over there and pick a paper. Locally, I'm still collecting nominees for the Greatest Physics Experiment. A quick scan through the comments gives the current list as:The Michelson-Morley…

I'll put in a sympathy vote for Hubble...

By afarensis (not verified) on 19 Feb 2006 #permalink

I would be inclined to offer a write-in vote for Francis Crick & Rosalind Franklin, two physicists who made a small contribution to understanding the basis of inheritance in biological systems.

Unlike astrophysics, poor biophysics is rarely recognized as being True Physics. :(

I'll have to vote for Faraday. I wish I had thought of this before, but I'd be interested to know if Ph.D.s in physics voted differently than non-Ph.D.s. I would expect that folks in different fields of physics vote differently, also.

I'll have to vote for Faraday. I wish I had thought of this before, but I'd be interested to know if Ph.D.s in physics voted differently than non-Ph.D.s. I would expect that folks in different fields of physics vote differently, also.

There probably are differences there, but even if I'd asked, I don't think I'm going to get enough responses to have any statistical significance...

I vote Faraday, he united electricity and magnetism setting up the stage toward a TOE (Theory of Everything).

By Josh Nahum (not verified) on 24 Feb 2006 #permalink