Google's most relevant names in Quantum Theory

[unusualname]

For fun only, put +"name" +"quantum theory" into google search, note approx number of matches

1. Einstein 407,000
2. God 268,000
3. Bohr 147,000
4. Planck 138,000
5. Heisenberg 136,000
6. Dirac 133,000
7. Weinberg 120,000
8. Feynman 114,000
9. Fermi 91,500
10. Schrödinger 88,300
11. Pauli 84,500
12. Bohm 76,300
13. Hawking 68,700
14. von Neumann 60,900 (+Neumann +"quantum theory")
15. Bose 57,800
16. Landau 56,100
17. Wigner 51,000
18. de Broglie 45,600 (+Broglie +"quantum theory")
19. Oppenheimer 33,500
20. Compton 33,200
21. Dyson 31,000
22. Witten 28,500
23. Schwinger 27,600
24. Bragg 26,600
25. Max Born 20,000(+"Max Born" +"quantum theory")
26. Chadwick 18,500
27. Yukawa 15,100



Max Born is a bit low here since "Born" is too common to search on and de Broglie result is also probably lower than it should be for the opposite reason. Similarly Yang and Lee are too common to search on.

I wonder how close the ranking is to a consensus view of the greats of Quantum Theory?

 

[Prathyush]

I wonder how close the ranking is to a consensus view of the greats of Quantum Theory?

God is second so its pretty close.

 

[DrChinese]

For fun only, put +"name" +"quantum theory" into google search, note approx number of matches

1. Einstein 407,000
2. God 268,000
3. Bohr 147,000
4. Planck 138,000
5. Heisenberg 136,000
6. Dirac 133,000
7. Weinberg 120,000
8. Feynman 114,000
9. Fermi 91,500
10. Schrödinger 88,300
11. Pauli 84,500
12. Bohm 76,300
13. Hawking 68,700
14. von Neumann 60,900 (+Neumann +"quantum theory")
15. Bose 57,800
16. Landau 56,100
17. Wigner 51,000
18. de Broglie 45,600 (+Broglie +"quantum theory")
19. Oppenheimer 33,500
20. Compton 33,200
21. Dyson 31,000
22. Witten 28,500
23. Schwinger 27,600
24. Bragg 26,600
25. Max Born 20,000(+"Max Born" +"quantum theory")
26. Chadwick 18,500
27. Yukawa 15,100

Bill Clinton + Quantum Theory: 7,220
DrChinese + Quantum Theory: 14

 

[Demystifier]

+"George Bush"+"quantum theory": 28,200
+"Allah"+"quantum theory": 7,200
+"Nikolic"+"quantum theory": 2,860
+"Demystifier"+"quantum theory": 1,620

By the way, I have noted that google gives to me much smaller (approximately, by a factor of 2) numbers than those given by unusualname. Does anybody know what could be the reason?

 

[Zarqon]

Google is constantly changing it's algorithms, updating different parts for different people, and has quite a lot of regional settings, so it depends on where you sit.


Wrt the list, I think you missed all of our contemporary quantum physicists. A few examples (for normalization, I also get einstein ~ 400k):

Zeilinger: 40k
Gisin: 20k
Plenio: 10k

 

[unusualname]

.

Wrt the list, I think you missed all of our contemporary quantum physicists. A few examples (for normalization, I also get einstein ~ 400k):

Zeilinger: 40k
Gisin: 20k
Plenio: 10k

Yeah, obviously it's a very flawed way of determining relevance ranking in the subject, I was just writing a brief introductory article and wanted a quick way to compose a list of important historical figures, mostly nobel winners (But I left out pre-quantum people like Rutherford 39,800)

You could alternatively filter the search for "quantum field theory", "quantum mechanics" etc. If you just use the search term "quantum" then it gives a similar list of names but people like Bose have unexpectedly high matches. I think the final list I got above wasn't too bad, just a little unfair on Schrödinger, de Broglie and Born.

Ranking by "name" + "quantum"

1. Einstein 5,090,000
2. God 4,640,000
3. Bose 2,550,000
4. Fermi 2,020,000
5. Planck 1,800,000
6. Pauli 1,440,000
7. Landau 1,040,000
8. Dirac 942,000
9. von Neumann 875,000 (+Neumann +quantum)
10. Bohr 812,000
11. Feynman 767,000
12. Dyson 743,000
13. Hawking 724,000
14. Heisenberg 712,000
15. Compton 629,000
16. Schrödinger 475,000
17. Weinberg 436,000
18. Oppenheimer 346,000
19. Wigner 328,000
20. Bohm 332,000
21. Witten 241,000
22. Yukawa 159,00
23. de Broglie 158,000 (+Broglie +quantum)
24. Schwinger 147,000
25. Chadwick 130,000
...
26. Born 57,100 (+"Max Born" +quantum)

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

snyder + quantum 4,440,000 results

 

[humanino]

I wonder how close the ranking is to a consensus view of the greats of Quantum Theory?

I wonder why you imagine google has something relevant to say about that, since my understanding is that you are interested in the consensus from some definition of a scientific community. No matter how large the community your definition makes, if the definition is relevant, the signal from the community will end up totally washed out from the noise google listens too. I mean that science is not democratic : pretty much all relevant textbook results, at some point were results obtained by one (or a few) individual contrary to the opinion of the vast majority.

Besides, even if google became an intelligent engine, it is hard to imagine the relevance of the question to start with. Like asking most relevant names in "sport" for instance, how to compare the relevance of baseball player with the relevance of a cricket player : the question itself will sound very different to a US citizen, an indian citizen, and a german soccer fan. Unless you meant "the foundation of quantum mechanics", the question is simply too wide. Modern electronics has very important theoreticians such as :
Bardeen 33,200 (yet 2 Nobel prizes for work in quantum related areas)

Finally, few results showing how google has no clue about the foundation of quantum mechanics :
Bose 89,300
Jordan 65,200
Curie 38,400
Gerlach 29,100
Goudsmit 14,200

 

[Pythagorean]

My theory why this doesn't work: there's millions of news and ad bunching sites that will have dynamic pages that pull up news articles relating to your search.

There's also a lot of real news sites that may have two completely different stories on the same page.

 

[Borg]

It seems that direction matters as well:

"quantum theory" "borg" - 4660
"borg" "quantum theory" - 4670

 

[Alienjoey]

Me + "quantum theory" - 802,000 results (23,700,000 for me + quantum)

Which apparently makes me more than twice as relevant as Einstein. Works for me.