Questions and answers with Philip W. Anderson
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0732
By Jermey N. A. Matthews
Condensed-matter physicist Philip Warren Anderson was born in 1923 in Indianapolis, Indiana, but grew up in the shadows of the University of Illinois in Urbana, where his father served as a professor of plant pathology. He later completed his undergraduate and graduate studies in physics at Harvard University before working at such places as the US Naval Research Laboratory, Cambridge University in the UK, Bell Labs, and Princeton University, where he now serves as the Joseph Henry Professor of Physics Emeritus.
Anderson received a share of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems; in 1982 he was awarded the National Medal of Science. From his research on electronic structure in materials come such concepts as Anderson localization and the Anderson Hamiltonian. He has also made seminal contributions to superconductivity theory.
Once a frequent contributor of historical reviews and opinion pieces to Physics Today and other scientific publications, Anderson, who turned 88 last month, has published many of those essays and some unpublished ones in More and Different: Notes from a Thoughtful Curmudgeon (World Scientific, 2011). Physics Today recently caught up with him to discuss the book.
PT : What motivated you to write this book, and what is its central theme?
Anderson : I have had a lot to say on general, vaguely scientific topics during a long career, but [my commentaries have been] scattered in tens of places, and even some of them completely unpublished. I wanted to express my point of view about the status and meaning of the modern scientific enterprise, rather than [focus on] any specific point or any specific gripe. I don’t think there is a book in existence that really gives you a sense—from the trenches rather than from some idealized, or deconstructed, artificial description—of what it is like to be a thoughtful scientist at the beginning of the 21st century. I borrowed my MO [modus operandi] of brief commentaries on published papers from Frank (C. N.) Yang, who used it in his Selected Papers with Commentary (World Scientific, 2005) to present what he claims will be his only autobiography.
PT : What does the title refer to, and why do you feel it important to embrace the curmudgeon label?
Anderson : The title, of course, refers back to my 1972 Science article “More is Different,” which was an early attack on the naive reductionist philosophy, nowadays much touted by Stephen Hawking and David Gross, and much more subtly and eloquently by Steve Weinberg. [That philosophy claims] that science’s most significant task is finding the underlying laws that structure matter and the cosmos: “Theories of Everything.” I took the point of view that the phenomenon of “emergence” is much more vital, where a simpler substructure—usually with a change of scale, hence “more"—gives rise to a conceptually new, “different” phenomenology. I thought it had been a purely personal letting off of steam, until 30 years later a very eminent scientist, whom I had admired immensely, leaned across the dinner table and said, out of the blue, “You know, you changed my life.”
As for “curmudgeon,” I do have a history of being skeptical of large, expensive experiments, and of very mechanized methods of solving problems, and of the [public relations] hype that necessarily accompanies them. I have even been wrongly blamed for the demise of the [Superconducting] Super Collider—the House of Representatives killed it; I testified before the other branch of Congress.
PT : How much of the book is new or unpublished material, and how did you go about choosing which of your previously published essays to include?
Anderson : About a quarter of the book has never been published in any form. I am afraid the choice of articles was otherwise much influenced by what was conveniently available in digital form. As I was winnowing the rest, I stopped arbitrarily when the book became too big for bedtime reading. Since then, I keep coming up, as I go over my files, with things I regret not including—for instance, Johnny (John) Wheeler would have been fun to include among my “Geniuses,” [featured in section V of the book] and an early review of a jeremiad on economic theory by Philip Mirowski (More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics, Cambridge University Press, 1989) would have helped explain that diversion in my thinking. Perhaps when I get closer to 100 I’ll do another selection.
PT : In the book, why do you tell younger theorists not to trust anyone over age 45, except maybe yourself, and maybe not even you?
Anderson : I was right about the “not even me” part. [When I wrote that sentence] I was off on a sidetrack. Yet in a way I was basically right: To get to a real solution, you have to somehow give up on ordinary thinking and completely rethink the conventional wisdom, and [that requires] a mind uncluttered with prejudices learned in a long career. Why am I immune to such rigidities of mind? Don’t ask me! It may have nothing to do with age. I suppose that it is in this sense that I really am a curmudgeon: I cannot bear indolent thinking.
PT : What are you reading at the moment?
Anderson : I recently finished rereading Muriel Spark’s The Mandelbaum Gate (Welcome Rain, 2001). I think she’s as near to a Jane Austen as the 20th century has had. I’ve also recently read Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). And I also recently finished, and would recommend to scientists, the marvelous book by Richard Holmes: The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Pantheon, 2009; see the review in Physics Today, August 2009, page 46).
PT : What are you doing professionally and personally these days?
Anderson : I’ve been occupied about half the time with caring for my wife. In my recent professional time, I’ve been pursuing an obsession with supersolidity of solid helium-4, where, again, the temptation to follow in lockstep with received opinion is not my problem. A year ago I used the offices of World Scientific to publish an extended, personalized history of the cuprate problem (“Personal history of my engagement with cuprate superconductivity, 1986–2010,” http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.2736 ); it has not been spectacularly convincing to the specialists in the field—but it is right.
