The US takes every of the highest six places within the physical sciences league table - and twenty seven of the highest fifty.
Honours are shared for the highest spot by the West Coast's California Institute of Technology and therefore the East Coast's Princeton University.
Chartered in 1746, Princeton is that the fourth-oldest school within the US, however its work within the physical sciences is as up up to now because it gets.
The first undergraduate chemistry laboratory within the US was founded by Princeton physician John Maclean in 1795, and throughout the nineteenth century chemistry was a needed subject for all Princeton students.
Today, it boasts the flagship Frick Chemistry Laboratory, opened in 2010. it's the second-largest single tutorial building on the university's campus and homes a number of the world's most advanced instrumentation within the discipline.
Covering a variety of subjects as well as astronomy, chemistry, arithmetic and physics, the physical sciences could be a globally various field - and an increasingly competitive one.
Although the US accounts for quite [*fr1] the world's prime fifty, there are 9 countries represented within the table.
France has 3 representatives: the École Polytechnique, the Université Pierre et Marie Curie and therefore the école Normale Supérieure.
Pierre et Marie Curie is one amongst the 3 famous Parisian Sorbonne universities. It specialises in science and drugs and it accounts for the lion's share of the annual budget allotted to the trio: €472 million (£416 million) out of €684 million.
Its foundations within the heart of the capital's Latin quarter date back 900 years. Its most famous alumna is Marie Curie, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 together with her husband Pierre for his or her work on radioactivity, and therefore the prize for chemistry in 1911 for her analysis into polonium and radium - analysis that ultimately value her her life.
Curie remains the sole lady to possess won 2 Nobel prizes.