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Top 100 Papers in Physics Ranked
Rob Carr writes "What do physicists care about most? Who are the greatest minds of our time? What physics papers have had the greatest impact? Sidney Redner attempts to answer that question by looking at the citations of all journals in the Physical Review Journals since 1893. He ranked the top 100 papers based on their 'impact': the number of citations times the average age of the citations. Einstein's Relativity papers, which were not in Physical Review journals, are the most stunning absence. 'Fan Favorites' are there - Einstein does make the list for the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paper. Feynman, Dirac, Bethe, Wheeler are on the list. Stephen Hawking does not make the list. Yet Nobel Prize winner Walter Kohn, who is virtually unknown to the general public, is an author on five of the 100 papers, including the top two and one of the top 15 'hot' papers. The paper goes into the statistics of the citations, a fascinating area in it's own right. Some papers make an immediate splash, while others might wait 50 years before their importance becomes apparent. The vast majority die a quick and quiet death. It's tempting to wonder if Redner's paper conclusively proves Sturgeon's Law."
Yeah, but it's just Phys Rev. A lot of cool stuff happens that never gets published in Phys Rev. Sometimes, it's a talk at a symposium that is published and makes a big splash.
Which says, "90% of everything is crap". A good test would be to look at the citations of the famous papers. Do they just cite other top 100 papers? Or did the authors of the best papers learn from the work of their less famous colleagues?
for example, feynman no doubt did some great physics, but he gets much, MUCH greater recognition over two other guys who did the same work (tomonaga and schwinger, they shared the nobel prize)
You're correct that Feynman was a more dynamic speaker/teacher, etc. But I think it's a bit of a jump to say that that's the only reason why he gets more attention than Schwinger and Tomonaga. For starters, they didn't all do the same work, even on QED. It's true that all three arrived at equivalent formalisms for calculating amplitudes, but that's not the same as saying they did the same work. Have you thrown away Feynman diagrams and straightforward perturbation expansions and instead tried to do things the way Schwinger did? It's a bitch! As a famous quote of the time went, "Feynman shows you how to do it; Schwinger shows you that only he can do it." And that had a lot to do with the eventual predominance of Feynman's perspective, and thus his getting more recognition than Schwinger or Tomonaga.
Furthermore, while I can't speak to Tomonaga in this regard, Feynman made a major splash in a much broader spectrum of physical investigations than Schwinger did. The work on QED was simply one of many arguably Nobel-worthy accomplishments of his. That, too, contributes to his being paid more attention to than Schwinger and Tomonaga.
Of course, you could argue that these are only things that matter to the cognoscenti; they don't explain why Feynman is more recognized by the general public. But I would claim that contrary to what physicists, and geeks who like physics, think, the general public is pretty oblivious to physicists entirely. They've heard of Einstein; they might have heard of Hawking. That's pretty much it, though. We think of Feynman as famous; the average person on the street has never heard of him.
So while I would agree that Feynman's dynamic personality, excellence in presentation, etc., is important in the way he is remembered by those who are aware of him at all, at least equally important is the fact that he did a ton of amazing new physics.
Ah, No.
Well, sure, it is not going to win this guy a Nobel prize, but it is interesting. Maybe not "research" by many definitions of the word, but definitely interesting.
For example, while I am quite familiar with DFT and have read most (if not all) of the Kohn papers mentioned in the article, I would not have guessed he would have placed so high. But that is the neat thing. This paper shows how much physics and chemistry interact. Many of the other paper in this top 100 list are probably more cited in the chemistry literature than in physics (e.g. Carr-Parinello)