Tag Archives: Nobel Prize

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Authors of the “Top Ten Works by Living Writers”

Posted on by
Reply

In a recent entry we explained to you nice people that – while we’re confident, secure, and brave – we’re ultimately gentle and sensitive sorts. The response we received from the dedicated PeekYou readership seemed to suggest that you appreciated our sharing so candidly of our inherent decency. Make no mistake, we appreciated you noticing. What we didn’t share then, though, is that – exceptional though we are when it comes to matters of compassion and philanthropy – we do not only reel from the world’s pain and rejoice in its triumphs emotionally, we also comprehend these things (and a hell of a lot of other even more complex things) intellectually. We are not only kind, forthcoming with our feelings, great listeners, quick with a hug, empathetic, charitable, and artistic, we are also simply very, very smart.

For every internet machine here at the PeekYou HQ there are a minimum of ten, maybe even eleven, books; many of which contain virtually no pictures. This is exceptional considering that we’re in the internet business, not the book business.

Today’s list will reflect not – as past lists have – our interest in brute competition, making hacky jokes about celebrity scandals, or TV shows there’s no way we’ll ever actually watch (love all those things though we do). Today’s list will feature those who forgo the sword for the pen (no small feat in our sword-happy culture), and conjure out of thin air people, places, and things which engage active minds – such as the exceptional minds of PeekYou – and those whose well-worn volumes of wordsmithery line the hallowed, ivy covered corridors of the PeekYou offices, from which the very words you’re reading are being typed.

Back in 2007, a book was published called The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, the title of which is fairly self-explanatory. Among the assorted top ten lists of favorite thises or thats culled from this poll of “writers” was a list of Top Ten Works by Living Writers. Miraculously, though this book is four years old, and the majority of the writers on the list considerably older still, only one is no longer alive (Muriel Spark died in 2006). We’ve decided it might be both educational and entertaining to see how the nine surviving authors on this list hold up when subjected to the scrutiny of a good, old fashioned PeekScorin’.

It’s not surprising that Stephen King tops our list so much as it is that The Stand was on the original list in the first place. It’s all swell, though. The Stand is a book and, as has been said, we just love the heck out of those books.

What books by living authors might you good folks have included? Comment and let us know.

Picture Name Bio PeekScore


Stephen King The extremely famous author of a boatload of best-selling books, the majority of which intend to be scary.


Gabriel García Márquez The author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the arguable godfather of magical realism


Toni Morrison The Nobel and Pulitzer prize winning author of such contemporary masterpieces as Beloved and Song of Solomon


Harper Lee Famous for shunning fame, she’s the author of To Kill a Mockingbird.


Cormac McCarthy The author of such modern classics as Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses.


Alice Munro Celebrated Canadian short-story writer.


Denis Johnson Best known for the short-story collection Jesus’ Son, he more recently wrote the novel Tree of Smoke.


Günter Grass Nobel Prize winning author of The Tin Drum.


Shirley Hazzard Author of The Transit of Venus and The Bay of Noon