Number 423 (Story #3), April 14, 1999 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein PHYSICS DEPARTMENT RANKINGS are almost always unfair, skewed, out of date, and misleading, but they're fun to look at anyway. US News and World Report recently ranked a multitude of professional schools and graduate departments in US universities. Their top graduate physics departments, in descending order, are Caltech, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Berkeley, Cornell, Chicago, and Illinois. Some subdisciplines are ranked too. In particle physics the top departments are Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford, Caltech, and Princeton. Nuclear physics: MIT, Michigan State, Univ Washington, Indiana, and Caltech. Condensed matter: Illinois, MIT, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. Atomic/molecular: MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Colorado, and Michigan. Astrophysics/space: Caltech, Harvard, Berkeley, Princeton, Chicago. Nonlinear/chaos: Maryland, Texas, Cornell, Chicago, and Georgia Tech. (For more rankings and for an explanation of the US News methodology, see this website: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/beyond/gradrank/gbphysic.htm.)