America still leads the world...
Despite America's overall decline, major cities and urban centers on the east and west coast remain the leading centers of physics over this period. The U.S. had 17 of the top 20 cities in 1990 and 14 in 2009. Several U.S. cities frequently rank among the top 20: Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area (Palo Alto and Berkeley), Los Angeles and Southern California, the New York metropolitan area (Piscataway, where Rutgers is located, and Princeton), New Haven, Philadelphia, Lemont, Illinois (Argonne National Laboratory), Chicago, Urbana (home to the University of Illinois), Rochester, Madison (the University of Wisconsin–Madison), and Columbus (Ohio State University). Interestingly, New York City proper fell out of the 2009 top-20 ranking altogether.China is on the rise, but it still has a long way to go before one of its cities becomes a member of this club. (And, yes, Seattle is not a member of this club.)Outside the United States, Tokyo, Japan; London and Oxford, England; France's Paris and Orsay (home to the main campus of University of Paris-Sud, known for its concentration of science labs); and Rome, Italy numbered among the world's 20 leading scientific centers in 2009.
