SteelyKid's day care is closed today, meaning that I will be spending the day chasing her in circles in a variety of different places. this doesn't allow a lot of blogging time, so you get a poll to pass the time.
We'll go back to the historical physics thing for this one. The following poll lists a bunch of less-well-known physicists (that is, not Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, Pauli, etc.) who contributed to the development of quantum mechanics. Which of them was the best?
While these are quantum pioneers, we're still working in the individual physicist basis. Linear combinations of two or more physicists are not observable, and thus not acceptable choices.
(This is even more hastily assembled than usual, so I'm sure I've forgotten some worthy candidates. If I've left your own personal hero off the list, rest assured that it was haste and carelessness, not malice.)
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Say what you will, but only one of those physicists is the grandfather of a totally hot, award-winning female singer. That's got to count for something!
It has to be Sommerfeld for two reasons. 1) He worked out the physics of bicycle riding! 2) He was a great teacher and the importance of teaching in science doesn't get the recognition it deserves.
I had to look up Hendrik Kramers on Wikipedia ... and it still didn't help. What is he in any way known for? I remember coming across all of those other names in my physics studies, but not Kramers. I guess he must have produced something notable, since somebody voted for him. Unless they confused him with Michael Richards' character on Seinfeld.
Off the top of my head, there's Kramers degeneracy (a consequence of time reversal symmetry) and the Kramers-Kronig result in dispersion relations, which is pretty big to the optics types.
I've always been impressed by Wigner, I'd probably vote either him or Born.
Kramers is also the "K" in "WKB Approximation," IIRC.
Vote 'other' and write in John S. Bell, of Bell's Thoerem fame.
Sommerfeld is interesting because he was good, a good teacher and came up with a model that was wrong. But I think wrong in a constructive way that helped Heisenberg and Schroedinger know what not to do - extend the Bohr model directly. There is a good history of Quantum Physics book that goes into this but of course I can't remember it.
Oh I forgot. I think Born shouldn't be on the list. He is in the "etc" with Dirac and such. He is the guy who put probability at the center of quantum mechanics.
"Kramers is also the "K" in "WKB Approximation," IIRC."
Looks like. OK, he can stay. :)
Kramers did a great deal of deep, fundamental work in statistical mechanics. He invented the "transfer matrix" fomulation of the Ising model (and its many cousins), as well as the concept of duality in the same. One could argue that his contribution to the solution of the 2d ising model was more profound that Onsager's - Kramers showed how to formulate the problem, Onsager did the math.
His biographer, Max Dresden, credits him with originating the concept of renormalization in the 1930's, although he couldn't get very far with it given the state of QED at the time.
And then there are the Kramers/Kronig relations in optics.
Less well known to WHOM? Dirac's portrait hangs next to Einstein's at the Institute for Advanced Study. Yet all the mainstream reviewers whom I've read about the wonderful book "The Strangest Man: A biography of Paul Dirac" by Graham Farmelo come perilously close to saying "I never heard of this weirdo." Was he the greatest scientist of the 20th Century whom the public at large did not make iconic? Or would that be (also at the foundations of QM) Ed Witten or John Archibald Wheeler (albeit Wheeler's better known to scintists for Geometrodynamics, and in pop culture for the term "black hole.")?
As noted above, Sommerfeld taught mathematical physics to most of the people who created quantum mechanics. I forget the details, but at least one of the key discoveries depended on the author knowing something learned from Sommerfeld but rarely taught to most physicists. He also played a key - but underplayed - role by doing the hideously complicated calculations that added relativity and elliptical orbits to Bohr's hack model, thus proving beyond any doubt that it was unable to reproduce reality. Proving that model was crap was crucial in motivating real QM.
@1 and @8 give two good reasons for Born, to which I add the Born approximation for scattering. I happen to think the probability interpretation was a critical addition to the theory, but not given the credit due. Wigner is in a similar situation.