Philip Warren Anderson Quotes
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The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.
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Although raised on the farm - my grandfather was an unsuccessful fundamentalist preacher turned farmer - my father and his brother both became professors.
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The first months at Harvard were more than challenging, as I came to the realization that the humanities could be genuinely interesting, and, in fact, given the weaknesses of my background, very difficult.
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That Big Science culture in the USA, and similar groups elswhere, tended to have separate, direct access to government and hence to funding sources. It was independent to a great extent of the rest of science, of which it was never a majority component except in funding.
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The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of a few particles. Instead, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other.
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... the state of a really big system does not at all have to have the symmetry of the laws which govern it; in fact, it usually has less symmetry.
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My own work in spin glass and its consequences has formed some of the intellectual basis for these interests.
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One of our brainchildren is a still viable Science and Society course.
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The oxide superconductors, particularly those recently discovered that are based on La
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I acquired an admiration for Japanese culture, art, and architecture, and learned of the existence of the game of GO, which I still play.
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The years since the Nobel Prize have been productive ones for me.
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The prize seemed to change my professional life very little.
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'Of course I am not religious-I don’t in fact see how any scientist who thinks at all deeply can be so ...'
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The field of quantum valence fluctuations was another older interest which became much more active during this period, partly as a consequence of my own efforts.
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I learned, practically in my cradle (actually from Bill McMillan's thesis), that the ground state wave function of a system of bosons should necessarily be real and positive, a fact which made his early Monte Carlo simulations infinitely easier.
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I have also testified repeatedly and published some articles in favor of Small Science.
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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.
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An important impression was my father's one Sabbatical year, spent in England and Europe in 1937.
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All I can say to the younger theorists is: don’t trust anyone over 45, except maybe me, and I’m not so sure about me.'
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The Nobel Prize gives one the opportunity to take public stands.
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Surely there are more levels of organization between human ethology and DNA than there are between DNA and quantum electrodynamics, and each level can require a whole new conceptual structure.
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'We atheists can . . . argue that, with the modern revolution in attitudes toward homosexuals, we have become the only group that may not reveal itself in normal social discourse'.