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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

This is off topic, but are there any physicists working today that are the modern day version of a Feynman, Einstein, Dirac, Wheeler, Bethe, Bohr, etc...?

I've been reading James Gleick's Genius and it was a question I had when reading about 23 year old Richard Feynman.

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Ed Witten?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Witten

Well, Witten is Einstein/Bohr caliber. Feynman was not.

Why do you say that?

Look at prize winners - then, where relevant - their students or people they mentored. For mathematics, Abel Prize winners and for Physics the Nobel Prize winners and Sakurai Prize winners tend to be recognized as the leaders of their fields for the particular research they work on. These are names that many in a given field would recognize or at least be aware of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakurai_Prize

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_in_Physics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Prize_in_Physics

One theory is that many fields in modern science are simply too broad and deep for Einstein-like syntheses: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/science/the-next-einstein...

Most likely, you will only know when they have passed.

Why? All the people I listed were highly regarded for their contributions at the time.

Maybe what's important is that I have no idea how to rate Feynman as a physicist. I can rate him highly as a writer though.

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