I'm nearly done with Graham Farmelo's biography of Dirac (honest), which discusses the major attempts to understand the behavior of electrons in quantum mechanics. this calls for a dorky poll:
Try not to base your selection on which of these historical physicists has the best biography written about them.
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#5 - Richard Feynman
I'm probably going to take some flack for this one. Feynman was and is so popular as a scientific writer, raconteur, and honest-to-goodness celebrity that his staggering scientific accomplishments are sometimes lost in the shadow of his own popular legend. But if we want to…
My vote is not based on who has the largest number of biographies, either. It's based on the fact that my teenager is studying beginning chemistry right now, and he and I started discussing electron shells, and I, a computer geek, can explain many basic ideas in the atomic structure and shell interactions based solely on reading Feynman's _Five Easy Pieces_, old Isaac Asimov science essays and my ancient, out of date 33 year old Physics 1A class.
As an added plus, my teenager is a musician who has chronic Percussion Hand Syndrome. Everything in the house is some sort of percussion instrument whenever he is near it and Feynman was a percussionist too. I'm hoping the relationship between percussion and science brilliance is a strong one.
Feynman rocks.
My heart says Feynman, my head says Dirac.
@springer
Haha! I felt the same way. ^_^ And I ended up listening to my emotions.
By the way, what did Shin Ichiro Tomonaga theorize?
Tomonaga was partially responsible for QED, with Feynman & Schwinger.
My vote is for Freeman Dyson just because he never recieved the recognition the other did. Dyson worked with Feynman on formalzing the math for QED. Some say Freeman was not considered as the third recipient (at least at that time it could only be shared by three individuals), along with Feynman and Swinger because he 1) never received a PhD and 2) because he was trained primarily in mathematics. You may know the reason that there isn't a nobel in mathematics - because Nobel's wife ran away with a mathematician. Was it Lobechevsky?
Benson VT's own John Wheeler
Re 6: Actually, Nobel never married. Seems he just didn't think of mathematics as on a level with the other subjects he honored.
E. None of the above
The answer is P.W. Anderson
While I love Feynman I have to say they all failed miserably when it comes to electron, THE most important elementary particle we still know next to nothing about. But one thing is certain, electron is NOT a point particle.
No Pauli, no Fermi, no Majorana, no Stueckelberg, no Dyson?