Sir Isaac Newton may have written the greatest physics work of all time, but he shouldn't rest easy -- he has heavy competition for being the greatest experimenter. Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles aims to find out. He's assembled an impressive list of nominees for the greatest physics experiment ever (and is drumming up interest in the greatest in other fields). Contenders include such household names as Galileo, Roemer, Faraday, Cavendish, Michelson and Morley, Hertz, Rutherford, Hubble, Mossbauer, and Aspect, not to mention Newton himself. Greedy bastard. Be sure to go vote. On the opposite side of the practicality/speculation scale, Christine Dantas has the somewhat more modest goal of finding the Best Quantum Gravity Paper of 2005. Help out, she needs both nominees and votes. Of course what we think is the best paper now might not be what we remember a hundred years later. A final way to have your own bit of vox populi be heard is to visit Wampum and vote for the Koufax awards (previously mentioned here). You'll have to keep checking in, as posts where you can actually vote are gradually being assembled; so far we've seen
If I'm good I'll keep a list here. We've been nominated in a few categories, including Best New Blog; I have high hopes for a respectable third-place showing in the Best Expert Blog category behind Pharyngula and Informed Comment.
