Thanks.

-cvj

I think Hawking’s Brief History of Time has been overrated. My introduction to physics started with Gamow’s books; many years later Feynman and Dirac were icing on the cake.

Even if only an honorable mention, there should be some room for the paper of Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow — not particularly for content, but the author list was incredibly creative.

Imnsho, it is them “in collection” and “in-syergy” which really provide, as dots in an impressionist painting, the “big picture”… from the big bang, to our final future destiny; and from the Universe, in all of its magnitue and content, to our smallest unit (still to be found and understood).

So let me just add to the already collectively provided great list, and in the spirit of “the big (but arguably quantized) spacetime picture” above:

1) Hawking Radiation paper, for letting us understand our
final destinity… evaporting black holes ever so far apart that eventually become a sea of radiation.

S.W. Hawking, Nature 248, 30 (1974); Comm. Math. Phys. 43, 199 (1975). (Combine as one.)

2) Beckenstein limit paper, for letting us understand
in no uncertain terms the discreteness of space-time
and perhaps suggest our true “physical units”.. for surely we will find a representation:

J.D. Beckenstein, Phys. Rev. D 7, 2333 (1973); Phys. Rev. D 9, 3292 (1974).

perhaps like those suggested by Finkelstein:
http://www.physics.gatech.edu/people/faculty/finkelstein/FQR02.pdf

3) Yang-Mills contributions for local gauge theories…
for without local gauge theories we would not have gone as far as we have in the SM.

Yang, Mills 1954 Physical Review 95, 631.
Yang, Mills 1954 Physical Review 96, 191.

4) Kingdon Clifford, for giving us Clifford Algebras, and the vision of General Relativity. Surely the trend to describe things with Clifford/Geometric algebras will continue to emerge as a better way to describe physical reality in the next few years.

But, remarkably, Clifford should also get much of the credit for the vision of General Relativity. Einstein indeed left a great legacy: he completed Clifford’s dream of describing gravity, space-time and mass interactions using Riemmannian geometry, and waves in curved space. (Good thing he was good at tying shoe laces.)

If you are not convinced, see the archives of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 1870:

“That this variation of the curvature of space is what really happens in that phenomenon which we call the motion of matter, whether ponderable or etherial.”

“That in the physical world nothing else takes place but this variation, subject (possibly) to the laws of continuity.” etc.

As for futures, (and I apologize, these sound fundamental to me, but of course, it depends on perspective , how about:

1) Nambu original paper on Strings (maybe with some reference to Susskind and Nielssen)
2) “Anomaly cancelations” by Green and Schwarz,
3) Gross’s et al original paper on Heterotic strings
4) papers by Penrose on the structure of space time,
5) papers by Ashtekar, Smolin, Rovelli describing LQG,
and its “alternate way” of doing quantum mechanics…
6) Sherck (and later Wess-Zumino!, or was it
Yuri Golfand and E. Likhtman ??) for SUSY,

or perhaps some unified version of the above like:

Thomas Thiemann, The LQG — String: Loop Quantum Gravity Quantization of String Theory I. Flat Target Space
http://xxx.uni-augsburg.de/abs/hep-th/0401172

… only these, only time will tell.

Sorry for the longish post,

- Mike

** For fun, check also top cited HEP articles:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/library/topcites/index.html

-cvj