Philip Anderson 1923-2020 | Hacker News Reader

Philip Anderson 1923-2020

math.columbia.edu

126 pointschmaynard7 comments

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...

It’s remarkably readable for the layman.

Yes, absolutely. I read it years ago and still think back to it frequently. It's really worth your time.

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.

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

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

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

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...)

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