The first two are in order and after that any kind of logical arrangement goes out the window.

• Richard Feynman
  • The way he thought was unique, that's why he was so great.
• James Clerk Maxwell [JCM as we call him in the business]
  • This man condensed over 60 equations into just three, that's some serious execution of mathematics! Oh and he was Scottish...
• Werner Heisenberg
  • Without the uncertainty principle Physics wouldn't have Quantum Mechanics and I wouldn't have a subject for my many topical essays.
• Isaac Newton
  • I appreciate this man because I am really really good at Newtonian Mechanics and Newtons Laws problems. They're also very important in keeping the Universe together and almost all the other people on this list wouldn't have had a job without Newton. But yeah, mostly my first point.
• Niels Bhor
  • The master of quantisation. Does anything else need to be said?
• Galileo Galilei
  • Personally I find his work uninspiring but someone had to do the groundwork for the fun stuff. [That's slightly disrespectful, I know, but I don't find the moons of Jupiter exciting at all]
• Albert Einstein
  • Theorised the General and the Special theories of relativity. Won a Nobel prize for something utterly different. That's cool. And let's face it, we're talking about EINSTEIN.
• Erwin Schrodinger
  • He's the owner of the most theorised cat in the known universe. Even in the unknown universe right physicists?
• Stephen Hawking
  • Whether his work in Physics holds for very long remains to be seen but he's a brilliant guy and he's done a lot for popularising science, which it really needed.
• Marie Curie
  • Major respect to this woman, she made her breakthrough after her research had already chronically affected her. Also she won two Nobel prizes [although one of them was for Chemistry so it doesn't count haha. Even I could win a Nobel prize for Chemistry. Hey Lewis won it for drawing some nice pictures. I could definitely do that.]
• Ed Witten
  • The only person on my list whose work actually just goes over my head. That's why I've listed him. 'Cause I have no idea what M-Theory is all about!
• Ernest Rutherford
  • Everyone knows Rutherford. His model of the atom was such a huge discovery at a time when science was sort of lolling around not doing anything in particular.
• Paul Dirac
  • A bit like Richard Branson. Dirac is EVERYWHERE. He has his own form of algebra for goodness sake. I'm really interested in his work on theorising fermions....
• ...Enrico Fermi
  • Hey, fermions are named after him!
• Michael Faraday
  • Named after a character on Lost. I'm kidding obviously...but there is a character on Lost named after HIM. Oh and everybody loves Faraday's constant, that's why he's listed.
• Daniel Bernoulli
  • The interesting stuff he did was REALLY interesting. He also did some boring work on statistics and economics....
• Nikola Tesla
  • I like to say that Tesla remixed JCM's stuff. He made it funky. He was the Mark Ronson of the Electromagnetism world. He also repeatedly told the world that Einstein was wrong and that takes some guts.
• Ettore Majorana
  • A real genius among geniuses who went missing in the '30s before he could finish his work on Neutrino masses. I find his story really interesting, surprising he's not more famous.
• Max Planck
  • I remember reading about how he solved the UV Catastrophe when I was nine or ten. That MORE than inspired me to do this subject.
• Me
  • Haha. Ha.