![]() ![]() In his famous 1972 article "More is Different," he emphasized that complex systems may exhibit behavior that cannot be understood only in terms of laws governing their microscopic constituents, but may require hierarchical levels of science each with their own fundamental principles. What a mentor!”Īnderson is also known for contributions to the philosophy of science through his elucidation of the concept of emergent phenomena. I would regularly meet him to talk about the problem he had given me to work on, but instead he would tell me about the things he was thinking about that day, and seeing his thought process was an amazing lesson in how to think about problems that decisively shaped my future career. “ I had the great fortune to have had him as my mentor when I was a graduate student. “Phil Anderson was a giant in the field of "condensed matter" physics, with an intuitive and often contrarian way of seeing the essential features of a problem from a new angle, which has often changed our way of thinking about it,” said Haldane, the Sherman Fairchild University Professor of Physics. Duncan Haldane, winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics, and he inspired countless others, including Brian Josephson, winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize, who took a class from him in his Cambridge days.ĭenise Applewhite, Office of Communications He became an emeritus professor in 1996 but continued to be a regular presence in the department until very recently.ĭuring his long career, Anderson advised many successful condensed matter physicists, including F. His “Resonating Valence Bond” theory of high-temperature superconductivity stimulated much debate and led to the field of “spin liquids,” which is at the root of a flourishing field of topological matter. He continued his research on spin glasses and developed a theory of the behavior of high-temperature superconductors, which operate at higher temperatures than traditional superconductors. During this time, he also worked on theories of materials called spin glasses where he again introduced, with Sir Sam Edwards, a set of ideas that remain fruitful today.Īnderson retired from Bell Labs in 1984 to become a full-time professor at Princeton. Ramakrishnan and Don Licciardello) and developed a scaling theory which made it into a quantitative experimental science with precise predictions. There he revisited his localization theory and was one of the “Gang of Four” (with Elihu Abrahams, T.V. in 1975 to take a half-time faculty position in the Department of Physics at Princeton. During this time, he explored the theoretical basis for superconductivity and the strange properties of helium-3. In 1967, Anderson began dividing his time between Bell Labs and a faculty position at the University of Cambridge in England. Anderson’s theory preceded the Nobel Prize winning work of Peter Higgs and Francois Englert on the mechanism for understanding the origin of mass in what later became the Standard Model of particle physics. In another famous paper written in 1962, Anderson showed how the photon acquires mass inside a superconductor. Anderson’s concept of how extended electron states can be localized by the presence of disorder in a system became known as Anderson localization and became a central inspirational paradigm in the field. This work would later earn him the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with van Vleck and Sir Nevill Francis Mott. Upon graduation, he joined Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he contributed to the understanding of ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism and thereby to the emerging understanding of spontaneously broken symmetries across physics.ĭuring this period, Anderson conducted research on the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems, which influenced the development of electronic switching and memory devices in computers. at Harvard in 1949 under the guidance of John Hasbrouck van Vleck. Naval Research Laboratory to build antennas, earned his Ph.D. He entered Harvard University for his undergraduate work and, after a short wartime stint at the U.S. 13, 1923, in Indianapolis, Indiana, and grew up in Urbana, Illinois, where his father was a member of the faculty of the University of Illinois. ![]()
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