>>11498349>>11498336>>11498356>>11498380back to your containment board guys
first of all, John Bardeen is a physicist's physicist and in the physics community he is worshipped. but not outside. other examples include Sidney Coleman, Gerard 't Hooft, Yoichiro Nambu, Lev Landau,Stanley Mandelstam, Paul Dirac (though Dirac has somewhat of a following) and even before them there were guys like Heaviside and George Green (come on, every physicist knows Green's functions, and his shit was remarkable in its day. but who the fuck knows George Green?)
the reason John Bardeen (to distinguish him from his son who is/was also a very good physicist, didn't check if he's still alive) is not famous is because only fundamental theorists get famous. and even some fundamental physicists who were top notch didn't get famous because their stuff was too down-to-earth (take for example Fermi or Gell-Mann). in order to make a splash on the front pages of popular media, you need to talk about the essence of spacetime or the quantum nature of reality. not how the quantum fields of electrons in semiconductors or superconductors work. that was bardeen's thing, he was very practical. it does not excite normies.
a similar phenomenon goes on with Nobel Prize recipients. everyone heard about how Higgs won the Nobel prize. "ooooh the God Particle!" even Barry Barrish and Kip Thorne got a lot more famous because it was "ooooh gravitational waves!". but who the fuck even remembers who got it the last two years? some dudes who worked on laser stuff and uh, whatever the hell else it was? meh. normies don't care unless it is super fundamental woo woo stuff
