Who’s the greatest American physicist in history?
[T]he sparse list of great homegrown American physicists makes two things clear. Firstly, that America is truly a land of immigrants; it’s only by including foreign-born physicists like Fermi, Bethe, Einstein, Chandrasekhar, Wigner, Yang and Ulam can the list of American physicists even start to compete with the European list. Secondly and even more importantly, the selection demonstrates that even in 2013, physics in America is a very young science compared to European physics.
The greatest American physicists would arguably be Richard Feynman for being Feynman (and technically enabling Thinking Machines by pissing off computer science), and Leonard Susskind for creating string theory. Feynman’s work did stuff. Lenny launched a million papers with summed zero empirical validation.
Wheeler revived general relativity. Thorne filled the world with physicists. Washington’s solution to homegrown talent being in the shadow of imports is to ban import retention, then redefine ignorance to be a form of knowing things re diversity emperors
Wall Street inhaled numerical physicists then embezzled at least $10 trillion. That is a lot of unsung heroes, more or less.
Why do the absolute theorists get all the plaudits – John Bardeen invented the transistor and he is the B of BCS theory. He was at the forefront of semiconductors – which have revolutionised our world and of superconductors – which may well go on to make a bigger impact