More and Different: Notes from a Thoughtful Curmudgeon

More and Different: Notes from a Thoughtful Curmudgeon, Philip W. Anderson, World Scientific, Hackensack, NJ, 2011. $38.00 paper (243 pp.). ISBN 978-981-4350-13-6

When asked to review Philip Anderson’s new book, I had expected the opportunity to fire a few curmudgeonly shots at the greatest curmudgeon to grace our profession over the past two-thirds of a century. But I was wrong. In More and Different: Notes from a Thoughtful Curmudgeon, Anderson has put together an entertaining and instructive collection of highly readable reviews, columns, talks, and unpublished essays on science and the scientists he has known. He is rarely inappropriately provocative, and he is a pleasure to read.

One of Anderson’s recurrent themes is his refutation of naive reductionism going back at least 40 years to his famous 1972 essay in Science, “More is different,” which unfortunately is not included here. Reductionism overlooks emergence. In a section entitled “Emergence as the God principle”—a well-deserved swipe at Leon Lederman—Anderson eloquently defines emergence as “obedient to the laws of the more primitive level, but not conceptually consequent from that level” (page 90). Nobody contemplating the Lagrangian of the electromagnetic and matter fields would have guessed that broken gauge symmetry was the key to the phenomenon of superconductivity. Even with the clue provided by the laboratory of Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, it took 32 years after the creation of quantum mechanics to discover the explanation, which is consistent with, but not implied by, the quantum laws.

We also learn about interpersonal relations at Bell Labs during its heroic years. We are given Anderson’s definitely non-postmodernist views on the science wars. We hear his altogether admirable opinions on the politicization of science. We get a history of the theory of superconductivity as seen from the frontlines. We get his opinions—almost all respectful, but often with an edge—about John Bardeen, Hans Bethe, Leon Cooper, Richard Feynman, Murray Gell-Mann, Stephen Hawking, Brian Josephson, Lev Landau, Bernd Matthias, Ilya Prigogine, J. Robert Schrieffer, William Shockley, and Eugene Wigner, among others. I could easily have listed more if the book came with an index.

The only part of the collection I did not find a delight to read are Anderson’s attempts to convey to the general reader the scientific content of some of his own contributions. He is aware of the problem: “I have elsewhere disavowed any ability [to explain technical scientific matters to laymen], and the reader—especially the true layman—will surely agree.” I would add that even a physicist from a different subfield will find some of his explanations a little terse. Just a touch of strictly pedagogical reductionism might have helped.

I blame most shortcomings of the book on the publisher. We are not told where or, more importantly, when most of the more than 60 essays were published or written, which often requires the reader to deduce from internal evidence the state of the issues at the time of Anderson’s critical discussion. Sometimes an essay contains references to other articles in the unidentified collection from which that essay was taken. And because many of the themes that interest Anderson are taken up in several essays over, one assumes, a span of many years, I found the absence of an index a frequent source of frustration.

I conclude with just a few of the many wonderful obiter dicta, which give More and Different a special charm:

“When we are all done, it will turn out that there is no exotic form of ‘dark matter’, merely a comedy of errors in a field where it is practically de rigueur to underestimate one’s limits of error” (page 107).

“Of course I am not religious—I don’t in fact see how any scientist who thinks at all deeply can be so” (page 133). And, “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” (page 177).

“Consciousness [is] one of the major deep problems, already apparent in the 20th century, which may take most of the 21st century to solve” (page 113). And “the greatest puzzle of all [is] the emergence of consciousness” (page 138). (When I complained to a very distinguished colleague that his Theory of Everything had nothing to say about consciousness, he replied, “Consciousness is an illusion.”)

“If there weren’t any solids we’d have no way to measure space—so by breaking the symmetry of space we have in a sense created space as a new entity” (page 144). (I was once charged in the pages of PHYSICS TODAY with postmodernism for making similar remarks about time.)

And, most engagingly, “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” (p. 159).