Runner ups:
Galilean invariance by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
A law of physics is Galilean invariant if the same formula works both when you are standing still on land, or when you are on a boat moving at constant velocity.
For example, if we were describing the movement of a point particle, the exact same formulas that predict the evolution of must also predict , even though of course both of those will have different values.
It would be extremely unsatisfactory if the formulas of the laws of physics did not obey Galilean invariance. Especially if you remember that Earth is travelling extremelly fast relative to the Sun. If there was no such invariance, that would mean for example that the laws of physics would be different in other planets that are moving at different speeds. That would be a strong sign that our laws of physics are not complete.
The consequence/cause of that is that you cannot know if you are moving at a constant speed or not.
Lorentz invariance generalizes Galilean invariance to also account for special relativity, in which a more complicated invariant that also takes into account different times observed in different inertial frames of reference is also taken into account. But the fundamental desire for the Lorentz invariance of the laws of physics remains the same.
Integer factorization by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Complexity: NP-intermediate as of 2020:
The basis of RSA: RSA. But not proved NP-complete, which leads to:
David Tong by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
A charismatic, perfect-English-accent (Received Pronunciation) physicist from University of Cambridge, specializing in quantum field theory.
He has done several "vulgarization" lectures, some of which could be better called undergrad appetizers rather, a notable example being Video "Quantum Fields: The Real Building Blocks of the Universe by David Tong (2017)" for the prestigious Royal Institution, but remains a hardcore researcher: scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=felFiY4AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate. Lots of open access publications BTW, so kudos.
The amount of lecture notes on his website looks really impressive: www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/teaching.html, he looks like a good educator.
David has also shown some interest in applications of high energy mathematical ideas to condensed matter, e.g. links between the renormalization group and phase transition phenomena. TODO there was a YouTube video about that, find it and link here.
Ciro Santilli wonders if his family is of East Asian, origin and if he can still speak any east asian languages. "Tong" is of course a transcription of several major Chinese surnames and from looks he could be mixed blood, but as mentioned at www.ancestry.co.uk/name-origin?surname=tong it can also be an English "metonymic occupational name for a maker or user of tongs". After staring at his picture for a while Ciro is going with the maker of tongs theory initially.
Henri Becquerel by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
WTF is wrong with that family???
John Bardeen by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
The Story of John Bardeen at the University of Illinois (2010)
Source.
Leonard Susskind by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
The bald confident chilled out particle physics guy from Stanford University!
One can't help but wonder if he smokes pot or not.
Also one can't stop thinking abot Leonard Hofstadter from The Big Bang Theory upoen hearing his name.
Figure 1.
Leonard Susskind lecturing in 2013
. Source.
Marie Curie by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Like all big names in science, she was at the right place at the right time and with the right interest and passion.
Notably, the man she married, Pierre Curie, happened to be a the world master at precisely the technique that she needed to carefully measure radioactivity: he had the most precise electrometers in the world, which allowed to detect small amounts of radioactivity via the ionization of air by radiation . These used piezoelectricity, which Pierre Curie co-discovered with his brother.
Video 1.
Marie Curie section of The Mystery of Matter episode 2
. Source. Fantastic illustration of Marie's life and work!
Figure 1.
Marie Curie c. 1920
. Source.
Richard Feynman by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Some of Feynman's key characteristics are:
  • obsession with understanding the experiments well, see also Section "How to teach and learn physics"
  • when doing more mathematical stuff, analogous obsession about starting with a concrete example and then generalizing that into the theory
  • liked to teach others. At Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman for example he mentions that one key problem of the Institute for Advanced Study is that they didn't have to teach, and besides that making you feel useless when were not having new ideas, it is also the case that student's questions often inspire you to look again in some direction which sometimes happens to be profitable
    He hated however mentoring others one to one, because almost everyone was too stupid for him
  • interest in other natural sciences, and also random art and culture (and especially if it involves pretty women)
Some non-Physics related ones, mostly highlighted at Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994):
Even Apple thinks so according to their Think different campaign: www.feynman.com/fun/think-different/
Video 1.
Murray Gell-Mann talks about Richard Feynman's intentional anecdote creation
. Source. TODO original interviewer, date and source. Very amusing, he tells how Feynman wouldn't brush his teeth, or purposefully forget to wear jacket and tie when going to the faculty canteen where it was required and so he would use ugly emergency jacket the canteen offered to anyone who had forgotten theirs.
Video 2.
Murray Gell-Mann talks about Feynman's partons by Web of Stories (1997)
Source. Listener is likely this Geoffrey West. Key quote:
Feynman of course, as usual, put it in a form so that the common people could use it, and experimentalists all over the world now thought they understood things because Feynman had put it in such simple language for them.
Two official websites?
In 1948 he published his reworking of classical quantum mechanics in terms of the path integral formulation: journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract/10.1103/RevModPhys.20.367 Space Time Approach to nonrelativistic quantum mechanics (paywalled 2021)

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