That voting has obviously been done by people who have never read the original texts of the people for whom they have voted.
Einstein is indeed one of the most important physicists of the 20th century, but it is really meaningless to try to establish a hierarchy between physicists, because their works are like open-source programs, each work is based on the works of the predecessors and it would have been impossible to do without those previous works.
In any case, Einstein was good, but Maxwell seems really superior in the sense that he could extract the essential information from the much more confuse sources that were available at his time.
The Treatise of Electricity of Magnetism of Maxwell and his collected papers are very instructive lectures even now and there are fragments of them that remain better than the equivalent fragments in many modern textbooks, despite the huge additional information that we have today.
Most of the original texts written by Einstein are now of interest only for understanding the details of how his thinking and that of the contemporaneous physicists have evolved during those important years, but those texts have little other importance except for history, because later better expositions of the same material have appeared. Nonetheless, it is important to also read Einstein's originals, because in many later books there are some inappropriate interpretations attributed to Einstein, but in reality Einstein had said something else and which was more correct than what some later author misunderstood.
> he could extract the essential information from the much more confuse sources that were available at his time
Wasn't this the case with Einstein's relativity as well? From what I understand the maths for it was already developed for many years, but Einstein was the first to tie it all together into a cohesive theory. Ideas like there being no absolute time, speed of light being constant in all frames, seem like a pretty big conceptual leap. I don't know how scientists at the time reacted to it, but defying Newtonian laws at a time when it was considered absolutely sacrosanct, must have been a big deal.
We see the same with general relativity, with ideas like saying gravity and acceleration is the same thing. I think what really impresses people is the radical nature of these ideas, which completely upheaval long-standing, prevailing notions. To do something like that once would be pretty remarkable by itself. But to do it twice, and in both cases, resulting in a new framework that will become the basis for nearly everything else, surely must put them in the conversation for the greatest at the very least.
Einstein is indeed one of the most important physicists of the 20th century, but it is really meaningless to try to establish a hierarchy between physicists, because their works are like open-source programs, each work is based on the works of the predecessors and it would have been impossible to do without those previous works.
In any case, Einstein was good, but Maxwell seems really superior in the sense that he could extract the essential information from the much more confuse sources that were available at his time.
The Treatise of Electricity of Magnetism of Maxwell and his collected papers are very instructive lectures even now and there are fragments of them that remain better than the equivalent fragments in many modern textbooks, despite the huge additional information that we have today.
Most of the original texts written by Einstein are now of interest only for understanding the details of how his thinking and that of the contemporaneous physicists have evolved during those important years, but those texts have little other importance except for history, because later better expositions of the same material have appeared. Nonetheless, it is important to also read Einstein's originals, because in many later books there are some inappropriate interpretations attributed to Einstein, but in reality Einstein had said something else and which was more correct than what some later author misunderstood.