ABSTRACT
The term “meme” comes from the Greek word mimeme, and it denotes an entity that propagates from mind to mind within a culture. The term was coined by Richard Dawkins in his bestselling book about evolution, The Selfish Gene, and Dawkins originally saw memes as functioning like biological genes in their properties of self-replication, mutation, and so on. But memes have meatier uses than merely explaining the replication of cute kitten photos. In a recent study of scientific memes, Tobias Kuhn of ETH Zurich and his colleagues used massive computing power to analyze close to 500,000 titles and abstracts from the Physical Review along with more than 46 million papers in Web of Science and PubMed. After showing that meme scores behaved similarly in all the databases, the authors focused on physics, listing the 50 highest-scoring physics memes in descending order from “loop quantum cosmology” down to "Higgsless".
