So the good people at the BBC have gone out of control with this “Greatest….” business. I don’t know when it started, but there was “The Greatest Briton” (Churchill), and “The Greatest Philosopher” (Marx), for example, and now there’s “The Greatest Painting In Britain” and “The Saddest Piece of Music Ever Heard”. (I wish I was making this stuff up, but no.)
Now you, me and the girl next door all agree - because we’re so terribly mature - that this is pretty much juvenile twaddle. Like when you were a kid and wasted time trying to decide what was your favourite toy, or game, food, movie, girl(boy)friend…. Remember? We grew out of all that, right? Right?
So what gives, BBC? Why would you get members of the general public arguing childishly over an unanswerable issue like which painting, philosopher, song, or Briton is “The Greatest”? You have them, instead of making their widgets in the widget factory, spending endless amounts of time pointlessly swapping reasons back and forth, passionately trading anecdotes, long forgotten facts, interesting ideas and conjectures…..wasting hours in the library and on Google learning things about each other’s candidate just so they can trash them with a killer argument…..
Hang on……
Announcing Cosmic Variance’s search for …..<drum roll>….
What we’re going to do is pick the The Greatest Physics Paper! It can be from any branch of Physics, and I will enlarge the term “paper” to include other established published forms of results such as books (so Galileo’s 1632 “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems”, or Newton’s 1687 “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica” can count), and famous unpublished manuscripts that nevertheless became known for reporting powerful results.
Pick your favourite. Make your arguments as to why your choice is The Greatest Physics Paper! (The reasons need not be all scientific ones.) Lend support to another’s champion, if you agree with them…..whatever. Humourous ones are allowed too, but let’s keep it to real, existing, papers. (And please, as always, try to keep your dicussions reasonably polite and respectful, even though I know physics can inspire real passion!!)
I’m going to let this one run for a while, and I hope that you’ll make some strong and instructive cases for wide range of interesting papers. Then in a while I’ll boil it down to a shortlist of, say, five papers. Maybe then I will try to convince each of my colleagues to join me in picking one paper at random to be its advocate, writing a summary of the case for it to be The Greatest Physics Paper! (Following the BBC model, we’re supposed to get five celebrities to do this, but I don’t know any (except Sean…), so hopefully you’ll make do with us- unless you’re a celeb and want to volunteer, or know one who would.)
Then we’ll put it to a vote….. There’ll be one summary post each per paper, and so you just come in put a single comment on the post for your favourite paper. We’ll count the votes.
…and then we’ll all go back to making our widgets. Deal?
-cvj
“Grundlagen der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie,” in Annalen der Physik (1916), by You-Know-Who.
This is the greatest physics paper of all time because it not only described the *law* governing gravity — that would be plain old vanilla Nobel material — it also told us *what gravity really is*. That is, it actually *explained* something. And that something is a phenomenon that all of us deal with daily. The fact that things fall is surely the most pervasive physics effect of all. And *what* an explanation: it’s that the whole idea of gravitational “force” was all a big mistake! When things fall, they are just doing what comes naturally [ie tracing out a geodesic in spacetime]. The problem is to explain why some things *don’t* fall! That was the most astounding advance in our understanding of the Universe ever, and that’s why this is the greatest paper.
This is a hard question to answer honestly, as “greatest paper” at least ought to include some component of “quality of explanation” or “quality of writing,” and, well, I haven’t actually read most of the Great Papers in the original. I know what a lot of them say, but how they said it ought to figure in the judging somehow.
Newton’s Principia is an excellent example. In terms of ultimate influence it’s hard to beat– it more or less created the entire field of physics. I’ve never read it, though (despite having gotten to leaf through a first edition), because it’s in Latin, and fairly opaque Latin at that. And I’ve heard people argue that the cryptic notation Newton favored accounts for the English dominance in chemistry and the German dominance in physics, as it was so difficult to calculate anything using Newton’s system (compared to Leibniz’s) that English scientists mostly stayed out of physics. (I’m not familiar with Newton’s system, so I can’t judge, but it’s a lovely story…)
It’s also hard to avoid bias in this sort of thing. General Relativity is likely to be very popular over here, but where I work, it’s not terribly important or influential. As a DAMOP person, if I had to pick a paper of Einstein’s, I might very well go with the 1917 paper on photons that Dan Kleppner wrote up in Physics Today. GR wouldn’t be in the top three (photons, EPR, and special relativity all beat it, and the photoelectric effect might edge it out for #4).
On a personal level, the most influential paper is probably a JOSA B article by the Phillips group at NIST that I read as an undergraduate. That played a big role in getting me into laser cooling, which got me where I am today. I doubt it would find much support here, though.
If you want nominations for Classic papers, independent of whether I’ve read the originals or not, I think the Principia is head and shoulders above the rest. Maxwell’s equations are pretty darn cool, too.
Very easy to make the case on this blog for:
Inflationary universe: A possible solution to the horizon and flatness problems, by Alan Guth.
In addition to changing our worldview in many different ways, it has the advantage of being a wrong paper…
best,
Moshe
ps: there is also “theory of leptons”, forgot by whom…but I am sure it will show up sometime.
There is no doubt that James Clerk Maxwell’s
“Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism”
was the greatest physics paper ever written.
In it Maxwell introduced the standard that ALL
physics models MUST obey, Dimensional Analysis.
If a model is not dimensionally correct, it is wrong.
Maxwell observed that a measurement was composed of a quantity, and the number of units of the standard for that quantity, and he found that he could accomodate all of the existing physical properties using time, space and mass.
Maxwell also modeled electro-magnetism using his famous equations, and integrated the dimensions of the E-M properties into his Dimensional Analysis by introducing the electric and magnetic constants (the permittivity and permeability of space.).
Maxwell also introduced the idea of point particles and anticipated quantum mechanics by suggesting that it would be necessary to use statistics to model reality.
And of course, Maxwell used “Maxwell Statistics” to model the behavior of aggregates of particles, and the Bose and Fermi statistics which are used to accomodate
the perceprion of photons as particles are nominal variations of “Maxwell Statistics”.
As can be seen in this book Maxwell established the standard to which all physics models must conform, and he laid the ground work for electronics, chemistry, vector analysis, atomic theory, and quantum mechanics.
Dimensional Analysis is physics.
Units are politics.
Equations are maths.
I’d like to nominate Bob Geroch’s Suggestions for Giving Talks (here it is in html). In addition to being brief and rather easy to read, it’s the most IMPORTANT physics paper ever written. Am I joking? Perhaps. But just imagine a world in which every physicist gives clear, interesting lectures… a world in which 90% of the audience understands 90% of the talk… a world where low temperature experimentalists flock to hear about string theory, and all relativists can discuss the latest developments in quantum computing. I think our field would be centuries ahead of where we are now due to the accelerated rate of idea exchange. Also, people woudn’t need as much coffee to stay awake during talks, and that would save departments money.
I doubt I’ll have much support for this nomination, but at least I got to plug a paper that everyone (esp. students) should read, if only for the sake of bewildered grad students everywhere.
I think a more interesting question would be “what is the second-greatest physics paper ever?”, since the greatest is obviously Newton’s Principia. For the laws of mechanics alone it would easily walk away with the prize, but there was also the law of universal gravitation and the derivation of Kepler’s laws, plus a useful new mathematical technique known as “calculus.”
Nothing else even comes close.
Might also be fun to think about “greatest physics paper of the last 50 years.” But then Chad’s bias problem becomes pretty severe — people would naturally gravitate to papers in their own fields.
Perhaps there could be a separate category for “well-written” papers, judged apart from their actual influence. I could vote for a handful of papers by Sidney Coleman.
Well, Sean, there will be five shortlisted in the end. They can’t all be Principia. And this is by public participation, so there is a possibility that Principia doesn’t even make the cut, if five others get overwhelmingly stronger support. We can have other categories -however interesting and more cleverly chosen- some other time. Recall, we are following the example of the dear old BBC.
How can we go wrong?
Cheers,
-cvj
Fair enough. They did pick Marx as the greatest philosopher, and Diana as the third-greatest Briton, so anything’s possible.
Ah! Now you’ve got it!
Cheers,
-cvj
Hi Chad, (and Everyone)
Don’t worry about which paper you think will be more popular here or not. I am not deciding which is the Greatest - you are!
So no matter how obscure or unpopular you think a paper is, if it means something to you and your life or work, or just out of intellectual curiousity/recreation, give us the full reference, and the full author list (no you-know-whos, because there are people of all levels of exposure to physics reading here), tell us what’s in it and make your case.
At the very least, we’ll all learn something from each other, and maybe read a few classics in the original, which is not a bad thing.
cheers,
-cvj
Oh dear, the “Saddest Song” would have been so much more interesting if they had been using the word in its colloquial sense…
So how about a wild card: Einstein, Podolsky & Rosen Phys Rev 47.777 (1935)
“Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?”
I don’t think we’ve seen the end of this paper yet.
7th ranked Phys Rev paper in citations, and cited more recently than originally.
Case could also be made for Shor’s 1994 paper on quantum computing, but that would violate the one nomination per comment rule…
Hi Steinn,
Thanks!
There is no “one nomination per comment” rule. It’s nice if people only make the case for one or two papers -as it strengthens the case for individual ones- but thre is no restriction. It is at voting time I was suggesting that people restrain themselves!
Cheers,
-cvj
Moshe, yes, indeed for HEP the topcited paper is still Weinberg’s Model of Leptons. You can see the list here http://www.slac.stanford.edu/library/topcites/2004/alltime.shtml
Field to field, the 2004 listing is not available, but you could peruse 2003 http://www.slac.stanford.edu/library/topcites/2003/eprints/index.shtml
It is a pity that Weinberg fell first into the doctrine of Effective QFT, and even pitier that after he rocketed out intro astro-ph matters.
From the topcites I would suggest
Axial vector vertex in spinor electrodynamics By Stephen L. Adler and
UNITARY SYMMETRY AND LEPTONIC DECAYS By N. Cabibbo
with the papers on GUT being ethernal candidates. But I am not sure if any of the topcited can really aspire to be “the greatest one”.
What about Faraday and the field?
What about Thomson and the electron?
I would vote for them but I haven got to read any of the papers.
For your consideration:
Since nobody has gone for it yet, might I suggest lending your support to Galileo Galilei’s “Dialogue concerning the Two Chief World Systems: The Ptolemaic and The Copernican”, or perhaps others of his great works? More about this particular one (yes, this is the one which chiefly led to his visit with the inquisitors) can be found in several places, but a translation and other information can be found here, or (much much better!), here .
Galileo is arguably one of the chief architects of what we think of as modern physics: working in a hand-in-hand equal relationship between theory and experiment. I’d put his works alongside Newton’s any day. ( Yeah, that’s fightin’ talk.
)
Do check out his Wikipedia entry (for example) for more information.
Cheers,
-cvj
One cannot compare books, summarizing years of work, with papers. If Newton lived in the fast information age, Principia would appear as a long series of 20-page papers, each of which would not necessarily be that influencial. Compare this to the extremely influencial commulative work of Wilson on the renormalization group and related issues, none of which is so influential by itself (perhaps the review with Kogut on the epsilon expansion?).
best,
Moshe
PS: OK, I dug up then reference
THE RENORMALIZATION GROUP AND THE EPSILON EXPANSION.
By K.G. Wilson (Princeton, Inst. Advanced Study & Cornell U., LNS), John B. Kogut (Princeton, Inst. Advanced Study),. Jul 1973. 126pp.
Published in Phys.Rept.12:75-200,1974
As for “greatest physics paper” it is clearly a choice between either:
1. W. Simon, Nuts Have No Hair, Class. Quant. Grav. 12, L125-L130, 1995.
2. M. V. Berry and A. K. Greim, Flying Frogs and Levitrons, Eur. J. Phys. 18, 307-313, 1997.
Look these up if you think I am kidding!
Seriously, though, the greatest is the 1915 paper on general relativity by “The Guv’ner”. While there are other great papers from the development of quantum mechanics or the Standard Model, these were really group efforts. Einstein’s paper is purely a solo effort, written by someone who was thinking 50 years ahead of his time. It has an originality and power that is unique and transformed our understanding of the universe. And we are still all heavily involved with it today, either in cosmology or in trying to find a quantum extension, be it string theory or whatever. A veritable tour de force of a paper.
I nominate Archimedes’ “Method”. As Reviel Netz discussed in the June 2000 Physics Today, Archimedes basically invented the concept of mathematical physics. He was one of the giants on whose shoulders Newton stood.
George
Moshe: Sure, a good point. But some papers do represent years of work too. Tough to compare, I agree….. But this is all what makes this exercise so interesting!
-cvj
Clifford, that’s like saying that John the Baptist is more important than Jesus, if I may venture an inappropriate comparison.
Clifford, I hope you are mistaken and you mean Galileo Galilei’s “Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences”. That is a real paper, with new results, and putting the first stone of the study of dynamics. The paper you refer, Two Chief World Systems, is mostly a review paper, isn’t it?
If unavailable at your local library, a scan of an 1914 English Translation appears easily in google, but you can also get zips of the original italian text here http://www.liberliber.it/biblioteca/g/galilei/index.htm or online.
Alejandro: I’m referring to the “Dialogue..” that I referred to. There is also the later “Dialogue…” you mentioned, which I agree is also a page turner!
Sean: You’re right - The comparison is inappropriate. Imho, it does not quite work. That would be like saying that Einstein’s photoelectric effect paper makes him a John the Baptist to Heisenberg’s or Schrodinger’s Jesus: I don’t think so!
(Gosh, this is fun!)
-cvj
As for the Method, the only new result stated there was rediscovered indepently by Kepler in his stereometria. Still it could be a runner for a “most influential paper”, because the quest for The Method, lost as the Grail to Arcturus, was a strong inpiration in Cavalieri and Barrow, who in turn pushed the work of Galileo and Newton respectively.
Let me throw in a vote for “Theory of Electrons and Protons” by Dirac.
And if we’re counting books, Dirac’s Quantum Mechanics book wins my #1.
Does “greatest physics paper” has to be on paper? Can early publications (prior to invention of paper) be counted, for example those on tree barks?
I would say the very first time some one put two dashes on a tree bark, a “=” sign which we call “equal”, was the greatest science break through in human history. Nothing could even parallel it.
Even today, the only way we know to describe any natural law, or any mathematical construct, is to put two different expressions on the two sides of the “=” sign respectively. Our intelligence simply has NOT gone beyond the ability to show the connection between two items using a single “=” symbol.
An advanced alien civilization probably has invented some more advanced symbolism, where they show the relationship between not two but three math expressions, using something like “Y”, drawn on a 2-D plane. And their languages also must be written on 2-D, which looks like crosswords, instead like our languages that are written on 1-D lines. I just can’t imagine how advanced that kind of intelligence will be.
We are still stuck with using “=” to connect two items at a time in our description of mathematical constructs.
Quantoken
Matthew, I think we’re counting books from times when those were considered the primary (or one of the primary) forms of publication of results in this field (physics). But make strong case for Dirac’s book, if you like. None of these are hard and fast rules….and there will be always notable exceptions….
Cheers,
-cvj
Ok. Quantoken needs to go read Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life”;
I don’t think maths papers should count; they’re not physics.
If they were, it’d be a tough choice between the suggestion above and the first appearance of “zero”.
If we’re doing methods papers, then surely Bacon’s Novum Organum should be the greatest.
I notice people are using names, so I’ll thrown in Thomas Young and the Double Slit experiment
Who would have ever thought such a issue as quantum entanglement could become GHZ entanglement experimentation and lead into productive futures of computer cryptography and communcications?
Paper references, please Plato, Steinn, Others.
-cvj
By which I mean “enough information for it to be found by non-experts and experts alike”.
And you’ve got to make the case by saying why you mention it, and what is in it.
And I really do want to hear suggestions from non-experts too, as well as science students, faculty, professionals of various sorts…..Everyone gets to have their say!
Cheers,
-cvj
Ooops. Novum Organum by Francis Bacon is a book, 1620 (OUP I think).
It established the basics of modern experimentally driven scientific methodology and triggered the Royal Society revolution of the 17th century.
BTW - folks, go read the Baroque Cycle trilogy by Neal Stephenson, it is a “must”, especially if you ever need to clean house at Trinity. (Quicksilver, Confusion and System of the World. Then go back and read the Cryptonomicon.)
The original Hubble expansion paper? Kirshner’s article on it, with original reference: Hubble, E. P. (1929) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 15, 168–173.
Do I have to make a case for it?
Probably up there with Young’s double slit experiment as “world-changing observation”.
A *very* close second is perhaps one of Zwicky’s papers on dark matter…. just four years later!
I can’t read German, but I think this is the right one: ?
Yes, Steinn, I agree. Actually Don Marolf raved about it and lent me his copy of “Quicksilver”. It is really very good so far. We should have a devoted discussion thread about these sorts of novels some day. It is a fascinating genre…
-cvj
Hmm if we are into ancients, the only decent physics paper I can think is Archimedes’ “On Floating Bodies”. Does someone else support this one? (I have already suggested some)
I agree that pure math should not be included but as a numerologist I am sorry about the proof of the existence of five and only five Platonic solids, that induced Kepler to propose his theory for the distance of the planets to the Sun and had induced Platon school to support for centuries the theory of “four plus one” elements. Which brings another question: do wrong papers count?
I joint to the vote for Dirac paper on the electron, but the one from Sommerfeld having the fine structure constant should appear then, should’t it? Was it an Annalen von Physik or something so?
Nice choice Simon. Hubble’s paper is extremely important, as it is responsible for establishing the Hubble Law (distance to another galaxy is proportional to how fast it is moving away from us), confirming (a fact that was already gathering momentum based on other astronomers’ observations, I’ve heard**) the fact that the unverse is expanding, which is a cornerstone of modern cosmology.
(**This bit may be urban myth….any others have comments on this?)
For people who want quick information on Hubble and Hubble’s Law, a good start is this nice Wikipedia article.
-cvj
On the Electrodynamics of Moving Objects.
By You-Know-Who.
Yes, boring, but it has to be said. This is probably the archetypical physics paper for most non-academic individual. (Newton’s Principia a close second, perhaps) Even if we may disagree as to it’s influence, this work is probably most significant in physics’ public persona. It’s very close to the ideal of science - a theory clearly formulated from simple logic, well stated assumptions and known facts, which is then confirmed.
This is the paper that crackpots try to emulate. For that alone it deserves recognition.
I would never vote for Newton’s principia.
Dont you think science of 300 years is a little outdated.
The greatest physics paper or book ever written is Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Hawking’s work effectively created the field of modern physics popularization, which hopefully led to increases in public awareness, study, and funding of basic physics research. Those increases, in turn, probably led to many new ideas and discoveries, for which A Brief History should get a small part of the credit.
We are still stuck with using “=†to connect two items at a time in our description of mathematical constructs. (Quantoken)
Yeah… man, I wish I had some notation to express the idea that x^2 = x^4 - 2 = -x/x = e^(x*pi)!
p.s. First person to solve for x gets a cookie! Unfortunately, it’s only a browser cookie…
The greatest physics paper or book ever written is Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Hawking’s work effectively created the field of modern physics popularization
Ummm….I think cvj was talking about “greatest” in the sense of “greatest *good*”…
Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen, Phys Rev 47, 777 (1935) “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?â€
No other paper in physics history put the right question so clearly. Physicists now only begin to understand what the scientific scope of this treatise is, and, undoubtly, whoever wants to tackle most of the big problems in contemporary physics must attack and solve EPR first.
By the way, if I had to suggest a candidate for the *second* greatest physics “paper”, I would go for H. Minkowski, Raum und Zeit (1907). Minkowski was of course the first person who really understood special relativity. John the Baptist for Einstein.
Aaron, I’m with you. To me, “Greatest Paper/Book” does not mean “Greatest Physicist” or “Greatest Physics Breakthrough.” While it is a little annoying when laypeople pour adulation on Hawking, the importance of his book cannot be denied. His writing may have DIRECTLY influenced more PEOPLE than Newton’s writing has (of course, Newton has been way more influential in the long run). The same goes for Marx - I think that more people have been directly influenced by the Communist Manifesto than by Hume’s A Treatise on Human Nature. Hawking would undoubtedly win the physics BBC poll - he should not be left out of this contest!
Then again, I admit that the public popularity of a thing can be a scary way to measure its “greatness.” A public poll on the greatest jazz musician would likely be won by Kenny G - the Stephen Hawking of jazz.
Ok, you’re going to hate me for this, but it has to be done.
Aaron, Jill and Chaz, I just don’t see how “A Brief History of Time” qualifies as a physics paper, by any stretch of even the wildest imagination. It’s barely a physics book. It is a popular description of some science, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there are no results or scientific arguments in there that explicitly moved science forward, and it is not aimed at his peers, or any research physics audience I can think of.
The book may have done something positive for science appreciation, but this is not what I’m talking about. And no, this is not snobbery, this is just a clear definition of what’s under discussion here. Even Hawking (I’m almost sure) would rather have one of his actual research papers mentioned in place of the book.
How about nominating his for his truly ground-breaking work: his singularity theorems with Penrose, the black hole mechanics paper of 1972/3 or his Hawking radiation paper in 1974, and the black hole thermodynamics work of 1976. That’s really good work.
And you’re right, Chaz, this is not neccessarily about great scientists (there are plenty of great scientists who have written awful papers), but great papers. They will be some combination of directly highly influential on the development of some area (or areas) of science, will have considerably changed our view of the way the world works, will be wonderfully clearly and compellingly written, will have presented simply beautiful results, or will be a model of the scientific method, etc. Most candidates will be combinations of all of the above in some proportions.
Cheers,
-cvj
Of course, I did say “you decide” , so I’m happy to play the game and be totally overruled by you, the readers. But do consider my words (above) carefully before deciding whether you want to support “A Brief…” as a great paper. Might you hang on and enter it for the “Greatest Popular Science Book!” post?
As Sean reminded us earlier, the British public put Diana on the top five Greatest Britons of all time, so I suppose Hawking’s “A Brief…” could make it to our top five. It’s a funny old world.
-cvj
Although not the greatest paper of all times, the seminal Nucl Phys B 1984 paper by Belavin-Polyakov-Zamolodchikov is pretty cool. Above all, the application of conformal field theory to 2D statphys might be just about the only major theoretical discovery after 1980 which is proven physics, in the sense that it has been confirmed experimentally beyond reasonable doubt.
Tough poll. I vote for…
“The quantum theory of the electron” Proc. R. Soc. London A 117 610-612 (1928) by P. A. M. Dirac
“The quantum theory of the electron Part II Proc. R. Soc. London A 118 351-361 (1928) by P. A. M. Dirac
…which we may think of as one paper in two parts. I picked it because:
1) The theory contained in it is beautiful & elegant (excuse the cliché).
2) The first successful Lorentz-invariant wave equation (SR+QM).
3) Electron spin not assumed, but really explained!
4) Antimatter (i.e. positron) predicted (experimentally verified 1932).
By the way, for mathematics, I would choose Riemann’s “On the Number of Primes Less than a Given Magnitude” (1859). After many years of hair-pulling, I’m still ploughing my way through H. M. Edwards’s analysis of this paper and the subsequent development of its ideas. Abel’s 1824 paper on the impossibility of solving (in radicals) the general equation of the 5th degree (and any higher degree, for that matter), is another favourite of mine.
On the other hand, I must confess I haven’t read many classic papers in physics and maths, and I doubt I would be able to understand most of them, notwithstanding the efforts of subsequent pedagogy. So I wouldn’t take my judgement on the “greatest paper in physics” too seriously!
Ummm..cvj, I think you missed my point. I was joking. Read it again.
Oh! Sorry. I’ve been calculating all day and getting muddled. It’s late. I did not see.
Sorry!
-cvj
Haha, no problem! But anyway to get back to serious [!] matters, my votes are Einstein 1916 for the gold, and Minkowski 1907 for silver…and while I am at it, Schrodinger 1926 for bronze. Why Schrodinger? Well, the idea that quantization might after all have something to do with continuous things was a pretty amazing insight…who else was guessing that all those quantum things could come out of a good old-fashioned partial differential equation? I like that because it was a spectacular demonstration that two ways of thinking that at first sight seemed diametrically opposed were in fact two views of the same thing. An example for us all. Maybe “background independence” and “dependence on asymptopia” are two aspects of the same thing?
I am surprised that this has not been mentioned yet..
“Invariante Variationsprobleme”(an english translation is available here) …Emelie Noether’s paper on Symmetries. The way we look at symmetries surely changed a lot after this. Let the more experienced pple here make the complete case for this paper.. but i feel this must certainly be a part of the five that are put to vote.
Jill, Yes. It’s about time one of the Quantum Mechanics papers got a plug. THat certainly changed our world, and I understand (but never read the originals) that they both were well-written papers.
Aswin: That’s an excellent suggestion too. Noether is so fundamental to modern physics.
-cvj
A suggestion.. i guess it is better to separate experiment and theory. Otherwise..theory will tend to dominate(as is obviously the case now) and path-breaking experimental advances may get left out.
And talking of of Hubble’s paper, the recent perlmutter & co. results sort of complete the story of the universe’s expansion. The non-zero lambda from these results is surely the hottest thing these days! Again.. a little surprised that this paper hasn’t shown up ‘here’..as of now
These two would be my nominations for the experimental side.
The Dialogue’s of Plato?
Book VII The Republic
Who was to know he was doing physics (dimensional analysis) and math at the same time? The Holographical realization of Hooft was made here(?), and for all junior science people this story is really quite a classic?
oops sorry, I forgot to dialogue link
The geometrical beginnings of string/M brane theory?:)
Or Euclids Elements
Postulates that lead through to the fifth all of a sudden take on new meaning, where points, line and planes become strings, and branes?
Grand Unification Transition G -> H -> … -> SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1) -> SU(3) x U(1) arising from Planck Epoch
I’m not convinced that the greatest paper should be the most fundamental paper, so I’m not voting in favour of Newton or Galileo. My votes are going behind the prettiest ideas that I know about. And, no, my calculus is not pretty
and since we have a shortlist of only five I’m hoping it contains:
“Grundlagen der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie” by Albert, Annalen der Physik, 1916
- the general theory of relativity
“The Quantum Theory of the Electron” (parts 1 and 2) by Paul Dirac, Proceedings of the Royal Society, (117) 610-612 and (118) 351-361, 1928
- does exactly what it says in the title, plus predicts antimatter
“A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field” by James Clerk Maxwell, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (155) 459-512, 1865
- unites electricity and magnetism, gives Maxwell’s equations
“Recherches sur la théorie des Quanta” by Louis de Broglie, PhD Thesis at the Universite de Paris, 1924
- wave/particle duality
“Zum Unitätsproblem in der Physik” by Kaluza, Sitzungsber. Preuss. Akad. Wiss., 966-972, 1921
- unites electromagnetism and gravity by adding just one extra dimension, the starting point for Kaluza-Klein theory
Since Clifford said we could make as many nominations as we like I have cheated a little and given 6 papers (by including Dirac’s parts 1 and 2). Also because of this I would appreciate it if you would imagine that I had submitted my nomination for the Kaluza paper (on Kaluza-Klein reduction) a hundred or so times. This will save it becoming tiresome to read over and over, but will hopefully ensure its appearance in the final five, as it deserves not to be overlooked as piece of truly original thought.
Its hard to disagree with the choise of Newton’s Principia, but here are two for second best:
The Astronomia Nova, by Johannes Kepler, 1609, which proposed his first two laws. This one book combined bold physical intuition and insight (including the first proposal that the orbits were the result of a force from the Sun to the planets) with painstaking calculation and data analysis, leading to momentuous and far reaching conclusions.
The Starry Messenger (Sidereus Nuncius), Galileo, April 1610 which reported on the discoveries he had just made with the telescope, including the mountains on the Moon, the phases of Venus, the moons of Jupiter and the existence of many more stars. The book is brief, written in an elegant but straightforward style, and it electrified both academics and ordinary people throughout Europe and beyond. By both introducing a new technology and giving the first convincing evidence for Copernican astronomy, this book made the Newtonian revolution inevitable.
No publication in physics, even by Newton or Einstein, has so decisively and abruptly altered the direction of physics than either of these books.
Lee,
I completely agree that your suggestions should be high on the list. Especially Galileo’s “The Starry Messenger”. Wouldn’t it be great to have those days come back, when a publication of astonishing new and profound results and ideas was in the form of a best-selling book that both public and professionals read alike?
All part of my dream to hear science from the mouths of every man, woman and child in the general public….
-cvj
Aswin, Under no circumstances must we separate theory from experiment. I said The Greatest Physics Paper!
Physics is about Nature, and is therefore fundamentally an experimental and observational subject. We can’t leave out the papers which represents its core motivation. This is why Galileo is one of the top of my list of heroes of the subject.
So bring on those experimental papers!
It’s time Faraday showed up, for example. One of his writings has got to be one of the top contenders from experimental side of things, no?
-cvj
I don’t hate you Clifford! I’m just having fun challenging people’s definition of “greatest paper” by steering things away from the obvious.
I wouldn’t vote for Hawking in a “Greatest Popular Science Book” poll - I think there are much better books in that category nowadays. He’s worthwhile in your poll for reasons mentioned by Chad and Aaron.
Lee has the right idea with Galileo, whose book “electrified both academics and ordinary people throughout Europe and beyond.” What can I say? I’m a soivent uh the little man.
Well, that’s good to hear. And I’m glad you’re a fan of Galileo too. See my suggestions in comment 15.
Cheers.
-cvj
The idea was to do better justice to both aspects. How do we compare tycho + kepler’s achievement (it is probably inappropriate to leave out tycho.. it was his data that kepler used) and the success of newton’s formulation(principia). Both are as path-breaking as it can get and I won’t want to put one before the other. Sure, ‘understanding nature’ is the final motive..but still the difficulties in exp are quite different from theory. Why not make it top 3 exp and top 3 theory ?
As far as other crucial experimental results are concerned…Faraday on induction, Hertz’s on EM waves, Cathode ray expts,Rutherford deserve mentions..
And more on theory.. Boltzmann please!! Stat. Thermodyn was probably the first major unification of seemingly disjoint areas. .. a driving theme in modern theoretical physics.
my theory list:
.It is one thing that struck me like hell)
1.principia
2.boltzmann
3.noether ( there r enough pple to get maxwell, einstein and dirac in. so i will continue to push for this
exp :
1. galileo
2.tycho + kepler
3.thompson’s cathode ray
4. stern-gerlach (my choice amogst the quantum expts)
5.hubble
6. perlmutter
to clifford :
I guess, I have already exceeded all limitations on nominations !.. if u ask me to pool exp and th together.. i will be in greater confusion. So, spare me that pain.
I’d have to suggest some of Gauss’. The Principia comes a close second. Maxwell third. It’s been a long time since I went through Gauss’ work. But he’s just got an elegance to his work. Newton’s very important, but his approaches are such that it’s honestly hard to read the Principia. I guess I just need a little Leibniz added to my Calculus.
I don’t know how to pick five either Clifford, but it surely is interesting to see what might have been important to those Like Lee and othe s who have lead the way.
I was looking for “Riemann’s thesis presentation” as Gauss sat and watched. Why did Gauss wait and publish, seeing that Riemann would take non-euclidean geometries in a positive direction? Gauss’s Coordinates?
Faraday’s experimentation was intricate part, with Maxewell on, so every contributor would have advanced the relation to Einstein’s geometrical undertanding on, in General relativity.
I like Kaluza and Klein contribution as well though, I’m not really voting but stuck.
How does one choose with so many advances, each contributing?
Actually I like both the EPR paper as well as Kaluza and Klein also.
As for Gauss, he was kind of an interesting person. I think he just didn’t care about getting credit for ideas. His biography was probably my favorite physics biography I’ve ever read, although long out of print.
Hi All,
Keep them coming, and do throw out thoughts while building your list of favourites, but do remember (I stress again) that we are not voting for our favourite scientists here. We are putting forward candidates for the greatest paper, with reasons. So -as in the last several comments- just saying, say, “Faraday”, or “Einstein” or “Galileo”, is no good. Pick one of their works, and make your case for it.
If you don’t know what their specific works are, this is a good exercise to ask yourself “So is areally great contributor, and I learned about him/her in highschool/university/whereever, but what were the actualy papers of books that this stuff came out in?” Then go away and find out. (Google Goolge Google, for example.) Then come and share what you’ve learned here.
I also repeat that we want papers from both experimental (+observational) and theoretical physics. So what about some great things like the laser? Bose-Einstein condensates? Transistor technology? What about the discovery of the positron? The crucial Millikan experiment? Rutherford Scattering (that’s got to be one, right?) I could go on…..
We’re all learning some history and some physics here!
Finally - all you people who keep coming in and yelling at me that string theorists don’t care about experiments….I seem to be in danger of putting you to shame so far in trying to get more firm experimentalists and experiments on the list. Yes, that’s fightin’ talk: I’m throwing down the gauntlet: Do better!
Cheers,
-cvj
Perhaps we could have two categories:
(1) 20th century papers and breakthroughs;
(2) Everything up to 1900.
In category (2), I agree Galileo is immensely important, not just for his work but for suffering in it’s defence.
In the 20th century, Feynman and Gellmann have been highly influential on modern physics: Feynman’s paper introducing path integrals for example and Gellmann’s work on quarks/baryons/strong forces, which introduced powerful group theoretical ideas into physics.
I would say the very first time some one put two dashes on a tree bark, a “=” sign which we call “equal”, was the greatest science break through in human history.
Coincidentially, I was just reading Martin Gardner’s Penrose Tiles to Trapdoor Ciphers and found this line:
A later book by [Robert] Recorde was the first in England to use the modern sign for equality. “I will settle as I doe often in woorke use, a pair of paralleles . . . thus: =, because noe 2 thynges, can be moare equalle.” (154)
Of course, the famous = sign was probably in use long before this; does anyone else know more about it?
Steve: Interesting suggetion, but the game is interesting whatever rules we have, so lets stick to the ones originally proposed: No restrictions on dates.
There are five to be shortlisted, so there’s wiggle room on pre- vs post- 20th Century ones showing up on the list.
More Physics papers please!
Cheers,
-cvj
If you’d like some experimental papers, here are a few suggestions:
Michelson and Morley (Wikipedia gives the citation as: “A. A. Michelson and E.W. Morley, Philos. Mag. S.5, 24 (151), 449-463 (1887),” though I’m not in a position to check that) did one of the all-time great experiments– anyone who has ever lined up a small Michelson interferometer using a lamp as a light source ought to be able to appreciate the effort involved in making an interferometer with an arm length greater than ten meters… It’s one of the more influential experiments out there, too.
My personal favorite from the early history of quantum mehanics is the Davisson-Germer experiment (either “‘Diffraction of Electrons by a Crystal of Nickel,’ C. Davisson & L. H. Germer. Physical Review. Vol. 30, No. 6 (December 1927): 705-740.” or “‘Scattering of Electrons by a Single Crystal of Nickel,’ Davisson and Germer. Nature. Vol. 119 (1927): 558-560.”) that demonstrated electron diffraction off nickel atoms. It’s another seminal experiment, but the best part is that it was a total accident– the experiment only worked because they broke their apparatus.
Rutherford’s discovery of the nucleus (probably “The Scattering of Alpha and Beta Particles by Matter and the Structure of the Atom” Phil Mag ser 6, xxi 669-88 1911) is another great one, and produced one of the great quotes in the history of science: “It was quite the most incredible event that ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you had fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.”
Other greats might include Millikan and Compton, who played a crucial role in proving the photon theory of light. If you’d like something more recent, you might consider one of Alain Aspect’s experimental tests of Bell’s Inequality (for example: A. Aspect, P. Grangier, G. Roger: “Experimental realization of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-Bohm gedanken experiment; a new violation of Bell’s inequalities” Physical Review Letters 49 #2, 91 (12 July 1982).) I’m kind of partial to the first alkali vapor BEC (”Observation of Bose-Einstein Condensation in a Dilute Atomic Vapor,” M.H. Anderson, J.R. Ensher, M.R. Matthews, C.E. Wieman, and E.A. Cornell, Science 269, 198 (1995).), too.
Chad: Thanks! Does anyone want to endorse any of these? Strengthen their cases somewhat? Throw in some thoughts about why some of them mean a lot to you? (I don’t want my own suggestions to have to count…)
-cvj
Penzias, A.A. & Wilson, R.W. 1965, “A Measurement of Excess Antenna Temperature at 4080 Mc/s.” ApJ, 142, 419.
This is the paper that truly makes cosmology an observational science. Plus from the initial POV of P&W the CMB signal was a spurious one, which goes to show that meticulous attention to detail and things unlooked for can prove at least as interesting at what you initially set out to observe.
Haven’t heard anything giving props to early 19th century mechanists like Hamilton and his refined principle of least action. You cannot escape the Hamiltonian in modern physics. Also popping into my mind is Mach, mostly for his analysis of mechanics and the notion of theoretical economy.
Yes Tom, thanks. That’s definitely one of the modern observational/experimental cornerstone papers for the field. For the non-experts, this is basically the paper that explicitly confirmed that the radiation left over from the Big Bang really was there, and with the correct properties.
-cvj
I nominate Lars Onsager’s papers on “Reciprocal Relations in Irreversible Processes” (Physical Review 37 (1931): 405–426 and Physical Review 38 (1931): 2265–2279) for membership in the greatest papers of the 20th century. Using little more than microscopic reversibility and the fact of being near equilibrium, Onsager derived very beautiful and general symmetry relations which (1) actually hold experimentally, and (2) have been hugely influential over the whole subsequent development of irreversible thermodynamics (you could argue the field began with these papers) and non-equilibrium statistical mechanics generally. And the papers themselves are models of clarity.
I think the problem is that many of us read their papers in college but getting access to 19th and 18th century papers now is a tad more difficult, even via interlibrary loan. Let alone to do so just for a semi-serious blog list.
The 20th century ones are typically easy to get. But while I read several papers of Gauss in college, I’d have a hard time even remembering where they were published, let alone how to get them and reread them.
OK, for Gauss, “Disquisitiones generales circa superficies curva” which brought us Gaussian surfaces, the math of curved surfaces and the notion of a geodesic. Some may say it is more mathematical than physical. But I’d probably still call it a physics paper. Especially given that the sciences hadn’t bifurcated quite as much in the early 19th century as by the end of the 19th century.
Einstein, A. “Ãœber die von der molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme geforderte Bewegung von in ruhenden Flüssigkeiten suspendierten Teilchen.” Ann. Phys. 17, 549, 1905.
Clark: Semi-serious blog!!!!? Ahem.
I found quite a bit of chatter on lots of interesting papers on Google. Even if you can’t find the original, it is a good way of seeing some of the impact and content of the paper.
I don’t consider it time wasted.
Mark Wilson: Want to tell us a bit about your choice?
Cheers,
-cvj
Well, enough varieties! Shouldn’t we concentrate on some of those appeared up to now to make a shortlist anyway?
I’m a conservative and in defense of common sense, so I go for Newton’s Principia.
(Some complained about the inaccessability of the great book, but there is a relatively easy exposition by Chandrasekhar “Newton’s Principia for the common reader.”)
Hi Jay,
I’m not going to shortlist in a hurry. I think I want to get lots of discussion and other suggestions from a variety of people interested in the topic. Will take more than a couple of days for the word to spread far and wide that this fun discussion is going on. So I’ll wait a while for the shortlisting phase. And then we go to the summary and voting phase. Exciting, eh?!
-cvj
Hey Clark,
yes to Gauss and gaussian coordinates, not forgetting, Saccheri, Bolyai and Lobschevasky along this lineage of geometers.
But I think I found a source here that might be of interest.
On the Hypotheses which lie at the Bases of Geometry
So parallel lines no longer exist in Riemann’s world, yet it’s hard to think that such extension to the fifth postulate could have ever been understood and moved to considerations of Alexander Friedmann’s equations and then gave one this sense not only of the ellitpical functions, but of spherical relations that were now understood in how we looked at Omega and shape in the universe.
So such a challenge to society and the rise to non-euclidean perspective had to be quite a achievement. Did Grossman know this when Einstein became stumped as to how to proceed with the geometry?
Very early on, and mention somewhere else, the mystery of what his compass could do had already attracted the ability of “insight,” to see the world in a different way. So you can see what a monumental achievement this continued evolution of geometry raises deep insight into what to become of these short distances?
While cosmological things are smooth, how so at such quantum levels and one wonders, how would such a dynamical world work, taken to consideration of a quantum geometry?
Ack, has anyon actually read Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen, Phys Rev 47, 777 (1935) “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?” It’s pretty bad. Apparently Einstein was not very happy with it either (I think Podolsky or Rosen wrote the original draft.)
To me, if you are going to nominate a paper along these lines it would have to be “On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox”. J. S. Bell. Physics., v1, n3, pp 195 - 200. While EPR said “quantum theory is strange”, John Bell saw this was an experimental question. Today I consider this the founding paper of quantum information science. Perhaps, however, this isn’t the greatest physics paper of all time, but I think it definitely is the most shocking physics paper of all time.
If I had to vote, however, Newton’s Principia would get my vote. The number of problems Newton solved in that one work, and the view of the world it opened up just plain rocks.
CVJ is correct, but for all those with university computer access I know of a tool more powerful then Google (yes), which is the University Online Journal Subscription. Oh yes, it is a might thing indeed. And sorry Clark but within a few minutes you can bring up James Rowan Hamilton’s (GO IRISH) papers on mechanics.
On a General Method in Dynamics. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. (1834) Vol.124, pp247-308.
Second Essay on a General Method in Dynamics. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. (1835) Vol.125, pp95-144.
Those who have been siting papers with ease already know this, but further searchers, check out http://www.jstor.org, Prola (at http://www.aps.org) or any number of other journal databases. Makes researching for both work and play (ala procrastination) so much more enjoyable.
Another meta-comment, I am absolutely amazed that most commenters find that most great science was done long, long time ago. It’s like the antique road show around here…I speculated above about one possible reason (books summarizing lifetime of work vs. papers summarizing a few months of work), but I am still surprised. Maybe another reason is that old works, stripped from their historical context, tend to look more like giant leaps. Not sure.
best,
Moshe
Moshe,
First off I think the split between modern and loosely defined classical physics in those post is about fifty-fifty though I am too lazy to make a precise count. Second, it is true that textbooks do often lack in historical narrative, but this is actually a good thing. You have to know the physics before you can go back and study the progression of a certain physical theory. I myself have spent the last six months going over and over again American journal articles from 1880s to 1920s on the topics of a luminiferous ether and Einstein’s relativity. Ironically, with more historical background, Relativity theory looks in some ways like an even greater leap forward then it did when discussed as the next logical step in electrodynamics and field theory.
~mtw
Heck, I don’t really buy this myself, but it’s no fun to just say “Yeah I agree it’s Newton’s Principia,” so… How ’bout Descartes *Principles of Philosophy*.
PRO:
(1)
It was a major attempt to systematize what had been learned in early modern natural philosophy into a comprehensive theory of the world.
(2)
It was tremendously influential (A); anyone who was anybody in 17th C. continental science–Huuygens, Leibniz, the Bernoulli’s–was a Cartesian in worldview.
(3)
It was tremendously influential (B); it’s what Newton was replying to in the MATHEMATICAL Principles of NATURAL Philosophy.
(4)
Offers an actual mechanism to explain the revolution of the planets (in notable contrast to Newton).
(5)
It features an early stab at the law of conservation of momentum (nothing on the conservation of JOEmentum, regrettably).
On the other hand,
CON:
(1)
It sure doesn’t seem real scienc-y, nowadays (but see below); it’s decidedly not mathematical.
(2)
Newton’s Principia can be read as a lengthy attempt to refute Descartes and, …, erm, well done, that.
Still, it’s fascinating to read along with Newton’s Principia, if only to really appreciate the difference between science before Newton, and science ever since.
Another meta-comment, I am absolutely amazed that most commenters find that most great science was done long, long time ago.
The problem here is the same as for any other “Greatest Noun Ever” list– recent Nouns just haven’t been around long enough to be put in proper perspective.
Inevitably, these sorts of lists either end up being very heavily front-loaded with recent items (see, for example, the asinine “Greatest American” list that the Discovery Channel did back in July), or heavily back-loaded with dusty old classics (many literary “Best Ever” lists end up this way). The average age seems to depend on whether the list was constructed by experts (in which case it skews old) or the general public (in which case it ends up reflecting recent fads).
I don’t think there’s really any way around that.
Well, folks, why don’t we try harder to think of really recent classics? What were the papers like that annouced some of the great results in astrophysics, observational cosmology, solid state physics, etc?
-cvj
Why every one is forgetting about stat mech? Why is no body nominating the work of Blotzmann , Gibbzs? Those were some realy original and hard to create abstract ideas.
And talking about statistical mechanics, reminds me of Max Planck. He was the real father of Quantum mechanics. where is he?
Well, go ahead and make those nominations, tell us the specific papers, and make the case for them….go ahead! Thanks.
Cheers,
-cvj
One very recent classic that comes to mind is the human genome project that was completed a couple of years ago. Not sure it is a paper, but there is a database somewhere… also it is not entirely physics, but large part of it was the sequencing techniques, so maybe it qualifies.
But as a particle physicist, I have to show my stripes, no theory before the standard model ever stood decades of intense effort by thousands of people and billions of dollars to find something, anything, wrong with it. So, Weinberg’s “model of leptons”, reference somewhere above.
This is too much fun, I’d better stop here…
best,
Moshe
No….don’t stop the fun! I seem to recall that the Georgi-Glashow SU(5) grand unified model of 1974 is a very beautiful paper, -power of group theory- although it might of course not be true. Also, should Gell-Mann and Nishijimas 1961 (62?) classification of hadronic resonances (I think it was that paper) using group theory was rather pretty, but I’m not sure if that is the paper I’m thinking of. And of course, should we be including Gell-Mann’s quark model (also Zwieg) (1964/5?) which also grew out of group theory… “The Eightfold Way”, etc.
Worth a look. If you like..come back and support one of them. Group Theory and fundamental physics hand-in-hand here….
-cvj
Clifford,
After a few nominations, it start being the ultimate challenge: how many contradictory opinions can one have simultaneously?
But, we are theorists, I guess we can go on…
Right…. let’s try for 10^500 or so, or even a continuum….
-cvj
What powers the sun and stars had always been one of the biggest mysteries in all of science for a long time. Probably wondered about since the earliest of times. Finally answered in the very crucial astrophysical papers:
Hans A. Bethe, Energy Production in Stars,
Phys. Rev. 55, 434, (1939); Phys. Rev. 54, 248, 862 (1938)
Also:
Fowler, Hoyle, Burbages, Rev. Mod. Phys.29, 547 (195?)
Also, maybe Chandrasekhar’s work on collapsed stars, white dwarfs etc. These were great leaps in our understanding of the universe. These papers should certainly be mentioned.
Ah, George and Glashow. I’ve never read it, but I’ve read this footnote from Peskin and Schroeder (p 786 in my edition):
As for the other, I think six impossible things before breakfast is the way to go. It’s always a bit annoying when one of those things is a part of a proof you thought you had completed, however. Ah well.
Steve,
Yes, those are great. The last paper was 1957 I believe, and you should give Margaret and Geffrey Burbage their separate recognition on the paper. This is the famous BBFH bible of how the synthesis of elements happens in stars.
But…one of my favourite papers of all time was by Hoyle himself. This is the only paper I know of where something that we would today call “Anthropic” reasoning played a role. At the time, Hoyle (being one of the (if not the) pioneers of the “we’re all made of star stuff” idea) was trying to work out how to get all the heavy elements that we know of to come from being cooked inside stars. He came to a point in the chain of nuclear reactions (getting heavier and heavier elements) where he realized that there was something wrong. You just could not use the known facts about nuclear physics to produce the right abundances of Carbon 12. Hoyle decided that, based on the fact that he - a carbon-based lifeform made of that quite abundant element- was around to ask the question, there must be a previously unknown resonance of Carbon that nobody has previously been aware of that would allow the nuclear reaction to take place. He computed the precise energy the resonance must have to get everything right, (and after great resistance from everyone in the field), convinced Willy Fowler to look for it experimentally. Fowler found it, at the energy that Hoyle had predicted!
Now, I would give up every paper I’ve every written a thousand times over or more to have written that paper. I consider it one of the most beautiful papers of the 20th Century. I think it is this one:
Hoyle, F., “On Nuclear Reactions Occurring in Very Hot Stars. I. The Synthesis of Elements from Carbon to Nickel,†Ap.J. Supps. 1, 121 (1954)
[Update: I'm not sure if it is this paper. Maybe the prediction ws published together with the results in the big BBFH paper mentioned above. Hard to determine from where I am now, with no library access.]
Anyway guess what folks? Fowler got the Nobel prize for that….Hoyle did not.
Anyone else want to support that one as one of the 20th Century’s great papers?
-cvj
Cosma (75), Thanks. I did not know those papers….
-cvj
I’m not seeing many experimentalists here. How about:
Onnes, H. Kamerlingh, “The Superconductivity of Mercury.” Comm. Phys. Lab. Univ. Leiden, Nos. 122 and 124, 1911
I will quote Feynman on that one: “I imagine experimental physicists must often look with envy at men like Kamerlingh Onnes, who discovered a field like low temperature, which seems to be bottomless and in which one can go down and down. Such a man is then a leader and has some temporary monopoly in a scientific adventure.”
And many years later the phenomenon is explained:
Theory of Superconductivity
J Bardeen, LN Cooper, JR Schrieffer - Physical Review, 1957
I also like very much the forementioned papers by Dirac. Perhaps Lagrange’s Mecanique Analytique deserves to be mentioned? A scientific poem, according to Hamilton…
I would second the nomination of Kepler (#57) even if only it were because of the second lay; the idea of measuring Time by using an Area saved Newton from circular reasoning in the Principia, and it has become our cornerstone in mechanics, under the dress of angular momenta. In the same thend I would no vote for the Principia except an special nomination for the Greatest Figure in a physics document, namely Book I, Section II, prop & theorem II, a figure that modern readers will recognise as a path discretisation typical of Feynman approaches :-).
We are failing on electricity, and it seems that some article on electricity and/or magnetism should make into the short list.
What powers the sun and stars had always been one of the biggest mysteries in all of science for a long time. Probably wondered about since the earliest of times. Finally answered in the very crucial astrophysical papers:
In that vein, there’s the classic Alpher, Bethe, Gamow paper predicting the microwave background radiation.
(Full disclosure: Ralph Alpher is an emeritus research professor in my department, and for a couple of years nominally had the office next to mine. He gave the office up two years ago, and now I have a big stack of his books in my office.
(I’ve only met him a couple of times, but he seemed like a nice guy. He’s also high on the list of “Greatest Nobel Committee Slights.”)
Hi,
Speaking as a amateur, I have these suggestions
Mécanique analytique by Lagrange.
I must confess to not having read this, but I have read other papers by Lagrange and they are quite simply classics of the French Language!
More importantly, unlike Newton Principia, this is the prototype for how we do Mechanics today. I understand that Newton is the great physics god, but for a college educated person like myself his work is total unaccessible.
Also has the important concept of Lagrangian Mechanics! And other goodies as well.
My next nomination is Robert Hooke Micrographia.
This is just so COOL!!!
Great pictures and even now brings goose pimples to my neck.
My next nomination would be Poincare’s
Les Méthodes nouvelles de la mécanique céleste.
I have only seen excerpts but this is absolutely HUGE outside of Physics! I mean Topology and Chaos Theory, cannot go wrong! Actually, I am surprised that Poincare gets so little attention nowadays. Must be that Einstein who changed Physicists taste in philosophy!
Einstein
Well anything between 1905 to 1918, but but I have only one pick so:
On Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.
Basically changed Fundemental Physics away from intuition towards simplicity.
Finally and this will send a chill down everyones spine here:
Leo Szilard, “Über die Entropieverminderung in einem
thermodynamischen System bei Eingriffen intelligenter
Wesen,†Zeitschrift für Physik, 53 (1929)
Of course Szila