Poll: greatest physicist ever

[thoughtfully]

If all of physics, including theory, still must come back to experiment for validation, Faraday is a solid second choice behind Newton, IMO.

Faraday also has one of the greatest rags to (scientific) riches stories there ever was. Sold off as a bookbinders apprentice, becomes president of the Royal Society. Invents the concept of fields, arguably the most productive mathematical tool for physics since the calculus.

[PM 2Ring]

Not to mention that Faraday was an excellent popularizer of science.

The 1827 Christmas Lectures of Michael Faraday

[TiglathPileser3]

Experimental and theoretical physics seem to be such different beasts that it's difficult to compare. Gauss and Faraday lived about the same time (64 years when they were both alive). Nonetheless, what each man did was entirely different and the other would have been incapable of doing it.

[doogly]

Oh no those you can compare, Gauss wins. The only thing that would prevent him from winning is a desire to class him as a mathematician and thus disqualify him from the present contest. But Gauss, all the way.

[psynik]

Is Tesla no a physicist?

[Radical_Initiator]

Certainly, but I tend to think of him more as an engineer and inventor. Just like I probably would put Gauss with the mathematicians. But perhaps my vision is too narrow.

[doogly]

And even if you give him full experimental physicist street cred, he still doesn't hold a candle to Faraday.

[PM 2Ring]

And even if you give him full experimental physicist street cred, he still doesn't hold a candle to Faraday.

I see what you did there.