From Emergence to Complexity

Anderson was one of the first scientists to publicly challenge the claim by particle physicists that they deserved the lion’s share of federal funds for accelerators because their work was the most ‘fundamental’. Anderson’s 1972 article “More is Different” challenged this idea and led to the idea of ‘emergence’ as a deep principle of Nature. He and Sam Edwards introduced a model for spin glass behavior and this activity dovetailed with his involvement in helping George Cowan, Murray Gell-Mann, Ken Arrow, and others create the Santa Fe Institute as a venue where complexity was celebrated as an organizing principle to solve difficult many-agent problems.

Four Facts About Science

This chapter is an exploration of Anderson’s philosophy of science based on the contents of his article in a British newspaper, “Four Facts Everyone Ought to Know about Science.” These are: (1) science is not democratic; (2) computers will not replace scientists; (3) statistical methods are missed and often misunderstood; and (4) good science has aesthetic qualities. Anderson aimed to alert the public about the inaccurate and misleading information they were constantly subjected to by uncritical journalists, agenda-driven political pundits, social critics of science, religious fundamentalists, and publicity-seeking professional scientists. He describes science as an interconnected web and discusses Bayesian statistics.

Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of Anderson’s career and contrasts his speciality, the physics of the very many (solid-state physics), with the areas of physics that tend to appear in popular media—the physics of the very small (particle physics) and the physics of the very distant (astrophysics and cosmology). It compares Anderson’s physics skills to those of a chess grandmaster. The number of pieces (atoms and electrons) is so large that merely knowing the microscopic rules of the game is not enough to gain real understanding. There is a focus on the big ideas Anderson brought to the table—symmetry breaking, emergence, and complexity—and also his great interest in the cultural and political aspects of physics. The goal of the book is to help readers understand the magician-like skills Anderson brought to theoretical physics and the effect these had on his students, coworkers, community, and on scientific enterprise.

Making Waves

Sixteen-year-old Phil Anderson does not fit in well with the prep school boys at Harvard, but he finds a congenial study group (including future historian of science Thomas Kuhn) and does well academically. The beginning of World War II causes him to change his major to Electronic Physics. His class graduates in three years so they can contribute to the war effort. Anderson does his service as a radar (microwave) engineer at the Naval Research Laboratory where he learns quantum mechanics, learns he is probably not suited for experimental work, and grows up socially. John Van Vleck visits NRL and helps convince Anderson to return to Harvard for graduate school.

Hidden Moments

This chapter traces Anderson’s work from his invention of an impurity model to understand the fate of a magnetic atom immersed in a non-magnetic metal to his solution of the Kondo problem using an early version of the renormalization group invented by him and later generalized by Ken Wilson. Important events on this path are the experimental impetus provided by Bernd Matthias, the Coulomb repulsion model of insulating behavior due to Nevill Mott, and Jacques Friedel’s ideas about treating atoms embedded in metals. Speculation is offered about the award of the 1977 Nobel Prize to Anderson, Mott, and Van Vleck.

Law in Disorder

A formal request by the theorists produces a stand-alone Solid-State Theory Group at Bell Labs. A summer visitor program leads several visiting theorists to conclude that localization occurred in Feher’s samples due to an electrostatic mechanism suggested by Nevill Mott. Anderson develops a theory for localization where the disorder in the positions of the dopants plays a crucial role. Mott champions Anderson’s theory and the Nobel Committee cites it when Anderson wins a share of the 1977 Nobel Prize with Mott and John Van Vleck. David Thouless re-ignites Anderson’s interest in localization and he leads the Gang of Four to develop a novel scaling theory of localization.

A Solid Beginning

Anderson chooses a job at Washington State College over a boring-sounding job at Westinghouse. Van Vleck intervenes to arrange an interview with William Shockley at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Anderson declines Washington and accepts a job offer from Shockley in 1949. A short history of Bell Labs follows, including the creation of a Solid-State Physics group after the war to, among other things, seek a replacement for vacuum tubes. A short description of solid-state physics follows. The team of Shockley, John Bardeen, and William Brattain invent the transistor and Shockley alienates everyone. Shockley tells Anderson to work on ferroelectric materials. Anderson dislikes the work but is personally impressed by Shockley as a physicist.

The Pope of Condensed Matter Physics

This chapter gives an overview of Anderson’s life at the top of the theoretical condensed matter world. He became very influential at Bell Labs and retired as a Consulting Director of the Physical Science Laboratory. He moved his half-time professorship from Cambridge to Princeton in 1975, but it took a decade to break down the resistance there to condensed matter physics. He was heavily involved with the Aspen Center and turned down an offer of the Directorship of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. He wrote the magisterial “Basic Notions of Condensed Matter Physics” but was widely regarded as a poor classroom instructor. His Nobel Prize gave him a platform to oppose the ABM and Star Wars ballistic missile systems, and the Superconducting Super Collider.

Conclusion

Anderson’s activities after age 85 are changed fundamentally by a stroke suffered by his wife Joyce. This brings him close to his daughter Susan for the first time. John Maynard Keynes is offered as a similar figure in intellectual history. A career summary leads to the conclusion that Anderson was one of the world’s greatest scientists.

The Cantabrigian

Anderson spends a sabbatical year at the University of Cambridge. He informs graduate student Brian Josephson about spontaneous symmetry breaking in superconductors and Josephson discovers the effects that bear his name and won him a share of a Nobel Prize. Anderson works in this area and pursues analogies to superfluid helium four. He uses an analogy to his work on superconductivity to suggest a mechanism for mass generation for elementary particles. Peter Higgs generalizes Anderson’s idea and later wins a Nobel Prize for doing so. Anderson spends eight years as a half-time professor at the University of Cambridge. He leads the way to transform solid-state physics into condensed matter physics and does important work on superfluid helium three. He and Joyce buy a vacation home in Port Isaac, Cornwall.