 MIT’s Max Tegmark Likes His Universe
C l u m p y
The
Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) bills itself on its website as the
"most ambitious astronomical survey ever undertaken," which is
not an overstatement. Using what is probably the largest digital camera
ever built (for civilian use, at least), the 2.5 meter telescope of the
SDSS measures the spectra of 600 galaxies and quasars in a single
observation. By the first phase of operations, completed in June 2005,
the survey had imaged nearly 200 million celestial objects and measured
the spectra and thereby the distance of more than 675,000 galaxies and
90,000 quasars.
The result has been a series of papers about the nature of the
universe and fundamental issues of cosmology that have parked themselves
in the upper reaches of the most-cited papers in physics. In this issue’s
latest Physics Top Ten, SDSS
papers currently rank at #2 and #3. The paper at #2, a 2004 Physical
Review D report on "Cosmological
parameters from SDSS and WMAP," racked up 45 citations in the
latest two-month period, a small portion of its more than 350 citations
in just over two years since publication.
This remarkable run of influential research has also served to put
MIT physicist...
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 Cream of the Crop: Food Science Flavors High-Impact Ag Research
Assessing
research performance that might literally involve being out standing in a
field, Science Watch here examines agricultural sciences over the last
decade. Table
#1 ranks institutions according to two separate measures: in the left-hand column,
total citations, and, at right, impact, or citations per paper, while
table #2
features
highly cited...
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