Most Influential Physicist

[Severian]

It depends on what you count as physics, and which continent you live on.

 

It is definitely not Hawking under any measure. If you count String Theory as physics, then I think it is Witten. If not, then I would probably say Weinberg.

 

To answer Martin's rephrasing of the question, I would probably say John Ellis or possibly Nima Arkhani-Hamed.

 

(ajb's post reminded me that I am supposed to be having dinner with Atiyah in a couple of weeks.)

[ajb]

 

(ajb's post reminded me that I am supposed to be having dinner with Atiyah in a couple of weeks.)

 

He is a nice guy. I met him once at a conference in York. Have fun at the dinner.

[SkepticLance]

At this stage we need to discount string theory. Until there is a series of positive predictive tests that fail to falsify string theory, we must regard it as pure speculation, not physics.

[BenTheMan]

[x] Angela Merkel

 

touche

 

To answer Martin's rephrasing of the question, I would probably say John Ellis or possibly Nima Arkhani-Hamed.

 

I think you're right about Nima. Personality-wise, he's absolutely fearless when it comes to making bold claims. For example, in Princeton this summer (in front of the IAS members, of which he is now one), he said (I quote) ``Gauge invariance is a bunch of crap.'' (What he meant was that there is nothing really fundamental about it---it is a tool that we use to build theories. To actually measure something, we have to pick a gauge, which means we have to take the gauge invariance out of the problem, which we inserted in the first place.) And out of all the lecturers I met at Princeton this summer, he was the one who spent the most time with the students.

 

He also has a completely different view of fine tuning, which is something that sets him apart from the older generation of physicsts.

[Fred56]

Hawking is a pretty awesome dude. He was supposed to be "dead" by the '60s. How many people do you think have read his book? How many of them do you think understand it? How many times have any of you read it (and understand it)?

[SkepticLance]

I have read Hawkings "Brief History of Time" and understood it. It was well written and made a great contribution to the understanding of physics by amateurs.