The Post Office Has Run Out Of People To Commemorate

I don't usually go to the post office, but I had to stop in the other day for a stamp, a single stamp. I happened to look at the stamp that they stuck on my envelope and noticed it was a rather large commemorative stamp of physicist John Bardeen.

Usually, when the Post Office issues a commemorative stamp, it's of someone well known, like John Wayne or Dwight Eisenhower or a Looney Tunes character; stuff like that. I think they might be scraping the bottom if they're putting out stamps for significant yet pop-culturally obscure physicists.

For those not in the know, John Bardeen was a two-time Nobel physicist: one for his work on the transistor, and the other for...something else. Quite honestly, I really don't anything about Bardeen, except for the Nobel/transistor thing, and the only reason I know that is because my high school Spanish teacher was Bardeen's nephew. As for the other people shown in the stamps above, well, that would require a trip to Wikipedia. But I'm willing to bet the rest of the population would have to make that trip for Bardeen as well.

It's nice to see "science types" getting the recognition they deserve. We might be better as a society if our knowledge of people like Bardeen was greater than our knowledge of Britney Spears, but...that's America for ya. Personally, I was hoping for a Wilhelm Röntgen stamp, but I guess John Bardeen will have to do.