Quantcast
  • Register
PhysicsOverflow is a next-generation academic platform for physicists and astronomers, including a community peer review system and a postgraduate-level discussion forum analogous to MathOverflow.

Welcome to PhysicsOverflow! PhysicsOverflow is an open platform for community peer review and graduate-level Physics discussion.

Please help promote PhysicsOverflow ads elsewhere if you like it.

News

PO is now at the Physics Department of Bielefeld University!

New printer friendly PO pages!

Migration to Bielefeld University was successful!

Please vote for this year's PhysicsOverflow ads!

Please do help out in categorising submissions. Submit a paper to PhysicsOverflow!

... see more

Tools for paper authors

Submit paper
Claim Paper Authorship

Tools for SE users

Search User
Reclaim SE Account
Request Account Merger
Nativise imported posts
Claim post (deleted users)
Import SE post

Users whose questions have been imported from Physics Stack Exchange, Theoretical Physics Stack Exchange, or any other Stack Exchange site are kindly requested to reclaim their account and not to register as a new user.

Public \(\beta\) tools

Report a bug with a feature
Request a new functionality
404 page design
Send feedback

Attributions

(propose a free ad)

Site Statistics

205 submissions , 163 unreviewed
5,082 questions , 2,232 unanswered
5,353 answers , 22,789 comments
1,470 users with positive rep
820 active unimported users
More ...

  Formal Wizards of 20th Century Theoretical Physics?

+ 1 like - 0 dislike
551 views

So I'm someone who likes to learn things first hand after learning them second hand through the standard material. So Which Theoretical Physicists are essential reading for understanding 20th Century Theoretical Physics?

My current noob/ignorant list is the following: Lorentz, Planck, Einstein, Bohr, De Broglie, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Dirac, Fermi, Pauli, Yukawa, Born, Bardeen, Lee, Yang, Landau, Wigner, Feynman, Schwinger, Bethe, Gell-Mann, Cooper, Schrieffer, Josephson, Anderson, Van Vleck, Glashow, Weinberg, Wilson, 't Hooft, Veltman, Gross, Wilczek, Nambu, Higgs, Thouless, Haldane, Kosterlitz, Thorne, Peebles, Penrose and Parisi.

All of these are basically theorists who have won the Nobel Prize in Physics listed in chronological order. Can anyone make this list complete by ordering it more logically and adding unrecognized obscure folks/string theorists who haven't won the Nobel Prize. Such a list would be really handy to have on this site for people like me. I think this would be an important project for a site like this.

asked Jan 29 in Chat by Sridatt Verenkar [ no revision ]
recategorized Jan 29 by Arnold Neumaier

It depends how wide you take ''20th Century Theoretical Physics" to be. They all (and many others) did important highly original work....

@ArnoldNeumaier What or who do you think is the best entry point into the 20th century literature after you learn all the standard nonsense from the standard books? By "What" I mean is there a "Central" journal like for mathematics there is the Annals? Or is it person like Einstein maybe? I know this question is rather smoothbrained but whatever.

I'd recommend to start by reading the Nobel lectures of the Nobel laureates, and their biographies. See
    https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/all-nobel-prizes-in-physics/

This gives a fairly good view of what has been important in the course of the 20th and 21st century. Once you are through you'll know which topics captivated your interest, and you can use scholar.google.com to search for research papers on these topics.

@ArnoldNeumaier That sounds sensible, thanks!

@ArnoldNeumaier hey can you or somebody delete this post? I don't really understand the deletion process here. I don't think I have enough points to do it myself.

The question has generated nontrivial response, hence should not be deleted.

All right. I wanted to delete it because I thought it didn't add much value. Also btw this "Formal Wizard" thing I read in one of Ron Maimon's answers somewhere, who I think helped start this site(correct me if I'm wrong). Just acknowledging that.

Your answer

Please use answers only to (at least partly) answer questions. To comment, discuss, or ask for clarification, leave a comment instead.
To mask links under text, please type your text, highlight it, and click the "link" button. You can then enter your link URL.
Please consult the FAQ for as to how to format your post.
This is the answer box; if you want to write a comment instead, please use the 'add comment' button.
Live preview (may slow down editor)   Preview
Your name to display (optional):
Privacy: Your email address will only be used for sending these notifications.
Anti-spam verification:
If you are a human please identify the position of the character covered by the symbol $\varnothing$ in the following word:
p$\hbar$ysicsOv$\varnothing$rflow
Then drag the red bullet below over the corresponding character of our banner. When you drop it there, the bullet changes to green (on slow internet connections after a few seconds).
Please complete the anti-spam verification




user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required

Your rights
...