One sceptic was Lev Landau at the Moscow Institute for Physical Problems. A highly respected physicist, Landau had clear ideas about how much he respected others; he was known to maintain a list rating his fellow researchers. Landau used an inverted scale from 0 to 5. A score of 0 indicated the greatest physicist – a position held only by Newton in the list – and 5 meant ‘mundane’. Landau rated himself a 2.5, upgrading this to a 2 after he won the 1962 Nobel Prize.[4]
