With the world cup stopping me from doing any real work I've taken it upon myself to create my Physicist football squad. It's been the best hour I've spent recently and I recommend it! Positions and places in the squad are not completely based on ability as a Physicist:

 

Goal: Rutherford,

 

Left Back: Archimedes,

Right Back: Bohr,

Centre Back: Einstein,

Centre Back: Newton,

 

Left Mid: Schroedinger,

Right Mid: Faraday,

Centre Mid: Galileo,

Centre Mid: Maxwell,

 

Striker: Heisenburg,

Striker: Boltzmann.

 

On the bench: Curie, Feynmann, Laplace, Dirac, Thompson, Kepler, Pauli.

 

Thoughts?

 

I'm happy with most of it other than the stike partners (hints of uncertainty from Heisenburg), and I accept that Kepler and Laplace might be considered Astronomers before Physicists.

 

Again, I welcome your ideas!

 

Ruben

Aren't they all dead?

Yes, and they if they were a team they wouldn't be able to win a rec-league game. The entire point is to pick your favorite physicists living or dead and make a soccer team out of them. Its kind of like an All Time Team of physicists.

Nothing eludes you michel - they are all dead, but as DJBruce points out its just for a bit of fun.

 

I'm actually writing this from the UK, so I accept the interest might not quite be there and any places I wrote football now become soccer. Apologies!

No, no, not "foot"ball. Baseball. Then you can implement the Lamb, Zeeman, Stark and Doppler shifts. Lamb, Zeeman and Stark were notorious pull hitters, and Doppler freaked out, shrieking like a little girl, if you ran directly at or away from him.

Sadly, Hawking can't play for the physicists team in his preferred role as a goal keeper ... the national team needs him.

Yeah, Hawking was a reasonable omition.

Here is my team:

 

Goal: Galileo

 

Left Back: Newton

Right Back: Maxwell

Center Back: Einstein

Center Back: Bohr

 

Left Mid: Schrodinger

Right Mid: Faraday

Center Mid: Feynman

Center Mid: Dirac

 

Striker: Fermi

Striker: Pauli

 

On the bench: Boltzmann, Heisenberg, Thompson, Penrose, and Hawking, Swansont,

 

As the English found out it is really important to have a solid keeper, and I also like a solid defense. For those reasons I put those physicist I view as the best or most important on the defense. Next in the mids I put those physicists that I view as incredible, but that did not quite make as fundamental impacts as the backs. The strikers and bench players are basically the other physicists that I like.

IMO Galileo should be the coach. Put Mach as goal keeper..

How can you not have Heisenberg at striker? The defense would not be able to simultaneously pin down where he was or where he was going! And deBroglie, because the ball would be a wave, and the goalkeeper could not stop it.

Feynmann would have to be my coach as he's surely the best communicator around. Hooke as talent scout: he's always quick to claim he saw it first.

Eleven players is not enough. We could imagine many teams. And till now all players are from occidental civilisation. No russian, no chinese, no japanese, no indian. Where are Friedmann, Gamow, Landau, Linde (he is alive), Prigogine, Sakharov, Chen Ning Yang & Tsung-Dao Lee (too old to play, but alive), Charles K. Kao (alive), Makoto Kobayashi (alive), Toshihide Maskawa (alive), Yoichiro Nambu (american, but alive), Masatoshi Koshiba (still alive), Chandrasekhar (passed away), and C. V. Raman, or is that a Nobel Prize is not enough to take part of the team?

Eleven players is not enough. We could imagine many teams. And till now all players are from occidental civilisation. No russian, no chinese, no japanese, no indian. Where are Friedmann, Gamow, Landau, Linde (he is alive), Prigogine, Sakharov, Chen Ning Yang & Tsung-Dao Lee (too old to play, but alive), Charles K. Kao (alive), Makoto Kobayashi (alive), Toshihide Maskawa (alive), Yoichiro Nambu (american, but alive), Masatoshi Koshiba (still alive), Chandrasekhar (passed away), and C. V. Raman, or is that a Nobel Prize is not enough to take part of the team?

 

To be honest I have only heard of a few of those physicists that you list, and after doing a little research on the ones I didn't know I will still stand by my previous team. At least my list was created with no conscious consideration of nationality. There are many very good physicists, and 186 of them have won a Nobel Prize in the 108 years its been awarded, but when it comes down to naming the top 11 for a football team there are more things to consider than just winning a Nobel Prize.

Hmmm... I like it Michel.... its different and progressive!

 

Perhaps a tournament could be organised as follows,

 

Classical (Greek, Babylonian, Egyptian?) natural philosophers XI,

Solvay Conference physicists XI,

Industrial revolution scientist and inventors XI,

Post war scientists (somewhat dominated by those you've mentioned).

 

I can just see the crunch as Democritus goes for a 50:50 ball with James Watt, or Kaku trying to lob de Broglie in the Solvay goal.

 

I love being a geek.

This thread reminds me of this Monty Python Sketch

 

 

Enjoy!