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  Formal Wizards of 20th Century Theoretical Physics?

+ 1 like - 0 dislike
563 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.

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