Sunday, January 15, 2006

Cosmic Variance's GOAT

Well I thought I would just write a reminder to all of you interested in GOATs (greatest of all time) that Clifford at Cosmic Variance has been running his vote for the top five physics papers of all time for just under a week. To make your vote just leave a comment under your favourite paper's post on the site, any noise will do (but only one noise is counted). The current standings are:

  • Newton's Principia 23 votes
  • Dirac's Quantum Theory of the Electron 13 votes
  • Noether on Symmetry and Conservation Laws 12 votes
  • The EPR Paper 7 votes
  • Einstein's General Relativity 5 votes

    So it's time to reinvigorate the votes! Newton's walking it, but General Relativity can't finish bottom - that's a disaster. So come on, if you haven't voted go and do so and help avoid this travesty. I've used my one vote but am tempted to try and beat the system just because General Relativity ought to finish higher than EPR. Surely.
  • 4 comments:

    Anonymous said...

    Thanks for that post, Paul. It did scare up a few more votes, I think.

    Best,

    -cvj

    Anonymous said...

    How many of those who voted for Principia did actually read even a single page of it? Two? One? Or just zero?

    Best,
    Kasper

    Unknown said...

    cvj, no problem, thanks for organising it - it was great!

    Kasper, I reckon the top 5 most read papers would look entirely different.

    Best wishes,

    Anonymous said...

    I guess it should have been the intersection of the "greatest papers of all time" with the most read. But that's for a future vote... ;-)

    best, Kasper