The Digital Footprints of 10 of the World’s Top Physicists

What is PeekScore?: PeekScore is a rank from 1 to 10, assigned to every person. The higher someone’s score, the “more important” they are on the web. In calculating your PeekScore and updating it often, PeekYou takes into account your known presence and activity on the Internet, including but not limited to; your blogging, participation in social networks, the number of your friends, followers, or readers, the amount of web content you create, and your prominence in the news.

Rest assured, you have read this entry’s title correctly. We’re not going to lie to you, this entry exists most of all because we felt it was time to class up this joint a little bit. We’ve done lists of models, and lists related to tawdry, headline grabbing scandals. We’ve written about athletes, and politicians, and even professsional wrestlers. While we apologize for none of that, we nonetheless felt that it was time to at least pretend to, momentarily, aspire to something greater. It is our sincere hope that merely by association, this entry will make the PeekScore blog appear deep.

You needn’t even speculate over who topped the list, as you likely guessed upon seeing this entry existed at all. He is the most famous physicist on Earth. Beyond him, however, we are featuring many staggering minds; only a couple of whom have any sort of social networking presence. This comes as no surprise, of course. They do, though, nearly all have homepages – however slight – associated with their universities, and many of them have quite a few citations, quotes, and articles strewn throughout cyberspace. While fairly matched against one another, and therefore reasonably competitive, it is a list of modest PeekScores for the most part.

Who are some of your favorite physicists? Don’t be shy. Share with us your feelings on the holographic principle, supersymmetry, superstrings, and so forth. You’re among friends here.

Rank Picture Name Bio PeekScore
1

Stephen Hawking A theoretical physics populist – aiding in making some big ideas, in even the most vague sense, comprehensible to we plebs – best known for his A Brief History of Time. 8.65 / 10
2

Lisa Randall A fairly well-known string theorist, as these things go. 8.05 / 10
3

Steven Weinberg Nobel Prize winner for his contributions to the electroweak interaction theory. 8.00 / 10
4

Edward Witten Best known as the creator of M-theory. 7.61 / 10
5

Sheldon Glashow Shared the Nobel Prize with Steven Weinberg for his contributions to the electroweak interaction theory . 7.11/ 10
6

Kenneth G. Wilson Was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1982 for his “constructive theory of the renormalization group.” 7.02 / 10
7

Steven Gubser A prominent string theorist, concerned largely with gauge-string duality. 6.83 / 10
8

Alexander Markovich Polyakov Russian string theorist, currently at Princeton University. 6.10 / 10
9

Igor Klebanov Another string theorist, working out of Princeton. 5.33 / 10
10

Juan Martín Maldacena Best known for his discovery of what’s sometimes called the “Maldacena duality,” or AdS/CFT correspondence. 5.33/ 10