Mind and matter

Andrew Zangwill’s March 2022 article (page 28) presents an insightful portrait of Philip Anderson in dynamic, human terms. I was particularly drawn in by Zangwill’s mention of Anderson’s Anglophilia and his association with leading researchers at the University of Cambridge. In that context, two of Anderson’s “four facts”—that computers will not replace scientists and that good science has aesthetic qualities—resonate with Brian Josephson’s interests in the past 20-odd years.

I met Josephson at an international conference, titled Home and the World: Rabindranath Tagore at the End of the Millennium, which was held by the University of Connecticut in September 1998. Josephson spoke about the poet-philosopher Tagore (1861–1941) and science. ¹ From my relatively brief encounter with him, I understood at the time that Josephson was especially interested in the area of mind–matter interactions, and that, of course, had some relevance to the well-known 1930 conversation that Tagore had with Albert Einstein on reality and the human mind. ² Mind–matter interactions have also been an area of sustained interest for many leading scientists, including Ilya Prigogine and Roger Penrose.

It is also quite noteworthy that Zangwill mentions Charles Kittel as one of Anderson’s mentors at Bell Labs. Many of us pursuing physics and engineering in India in the 1970s were introduced to Kittel’s classic textbook Introduction to Solid State Physics, which was foundational to our understanding of the subject.