
Philip Anderson 1923-2020 - chmaynard
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=11698
======
rubidium
A legendary impact on the field of condensed matter science and emergence.

I recommend go and read his “more is different” paper right now if you
haven’t.
[http://robotics.cs.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72mo...](http://robotics.cs.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72more_is_different.pdf)

It’s remarkably readable for the layman.

~~~
PaulHoule
Anderson was one of the most respected researchers in CM; he was the thesis
advisor of a professor I worked closely with in grad school.

~~~
hpcjoe
He was my[1] thesis advisors' thesis advisor. BD Josephson, also a Nobel
laureate, was a student of his. Vijay Pande at Stanford is also a student of
his.

[1]
[https://academictree.org/physics/tree.php?pid=743767](https://academictree.org/physics/tree.php?pid=743767)

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sbdmmg
Fun story. In the Princeton Physics dept. corridors (ca. 2010) there were
posters and papers talking about current research and results. One of them,
not far from Anderson's office, was about broken symmetries and the Higgs
boson. In it, a sentence described how "the mechanism of spontaneus symmetry
breaking, proposed by Peter Higgs, explained the non-zero mass of the boson"
(I don't remember the exact sentence...but it was something along these
lines).

Someone had crossed out that sentence with a red pen, and corrected it by
writing that the mechanism had been proposed by Anderson in 1962. I always
wondered who had done that :-)

RIP

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chris_wot
Can someone explain what he didn’t like about string theory?

~~~
miles7
Here's a brief statement by Anderson that he wrote for the website
www.edge.org. Apparently his main issue was that string theory isn't
experimentally driven:

""" Philip W. Anderson Physicist and Nobel laureate, Princeton

Is string theory a futile exercise as physics, as I believe it to be? It is an
interesting mathematical specialty and has produced and will produce
mathematics useful in other contexts, but it seems no more vital as
mathematics than other areas of very abstract or specialized math, and doesn't
on that basis justify the incredible amount of effort expended on it.

My belief is based on the fact that string theory is the first science in
hundreds of years to be pursued in pre-Baconian fashion, without any adequate
experimental guidance. It proposes that Nature is the way we would like it to
be rather than the way we see it to be; and it is improbable that Nature
thinks the same way we do.

The sad thing is that, as several young would-be theorists have explained to
me, it is so highly developed that it is a full-time job just to keep up with
it. That means that other avenues are not being explored by the bright,
imaginative young people, and that alternative career paths are blocked. """

(source: [https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/science/god-or-not-
physic...](https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/science/god-or-not-physics-and-
of-course-love-scientists-take-a-leap.html))

