Philip Anderson

Born on 13 December 1923 in Indianapolis, Indiana, Philip Anderson is a versatile theoretical physicist who shared the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physics for “fundamental theoretical investigations of the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems.” Anderson studied physics at Harvard and went on to hold positions at Bell Labs, Cambridge, and Princeton. His contributions to physics are wide-ranging and important. He has worked on theories of symmetry breaking, localization of electrons, magnetism, and superconductivity. In 1972 he wrote the influential essay “More is different ,” which argued that the theorist’s attempt to explain the workings of nature in terms of ever-more fundamental particles and forces is flawed because it fails to account for superconductivity and other phenomena that emerge from particle interactions. Anderson shared the 1977 physics Nobel with Nevill Mott and John van Vleck. One of his students was Duncan Haldane, who shared the 2016 physics Nobel . You can read an interview with Anderson here .

Date in History: 13 December 1923