Philip Warren Anderson quotes

Of course I am not religious-I don't in fact see how any scientist who thinks at all deeply can be so ... (Philip Warren Anderson)
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. View quote
Philip Warren Anderson
My belief is based on the fact that string theory is the first science in hundreds of years to be pursued in pre-Baconian fashion, without any adequate experimental guidance. View quote
Philip Warren Anderson
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. View quote
Philip Warren Anderson
Although raised on the farm - my grandfather was an unsuccessful fundamentalist preacher turned farmer - my father and his brother both became professors. View quote
Philip Warren Anderson
I acquired an admiration for Japanese culture, art, and architecture, and learned of the existence of the game of GO, which I still play. View quote
Philip Warren Anderson
The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. View quote
Philip Warren Anderson
The first months at Harvard were more than challenging, as I came to the realization that the humanities could be genuinely interesting, and, in fact, given the weaknesses of my background, very difficult. View quote
Philip Warren Anderson
... the state of a really big system does not at all have to have the symmetry of the laws which govern it; in fact, it usually has less symmetry. View quote
Philip Warren Anderson
By symmetry we mean the existence of different viewpoints from which the system appears the same. It is only slightly overstating the case to say that physics is the study of symmetry. The first demonstration of the power of this idea may have been by Newton, who may have asked himself the question: What if the matter here in my hand obeys the same laws as that up in the sky-that is, what if space and matter are homogeneous and isotropic? View quote
Philip Warren Anderson
It is seen as the application of a systematic "scientific method” involving wearing a white coat and being dull. I feel that too many young people come into science with this view, and that too many fields degenerate into the kind of work which results: automatic crank-turning and data-collecting of the sort which Kuhn calls "normal science” and Rutherford "stamp-collecting”. In fact, the creation of new science is a creative act, literally, and people who are not creative are not very good at it. (Philip Warren Anderson)
I learned, practically in my cradle (actually from Bill McMillan's thesis), that the ground state wave function of a system of bosons should necessarily be real and positive, a fact which made his early Monte Carlo simulations infinitely easier. View quote
Philip Warren Anderson
My Harvard classmate, Thomas S. Kuhn wrote, some years ago, an influential book about scientific revolutions. Fortunately, many scientific revolutions do not follow his scenario, but the one he focused on, the discovery of quantum mechanics, is well described by his model, which is most valid for a revolution occurring in the central core of a mature science. View quote
Philip Warren Anderson
The oxide superconductors, particularly those recently discovered that are based on La2CuO4, have a set of peculiarities that suggest a common, unique mechanism: they tend in every case to occur near a metal-insulator transition into an odd-electron insulator with peculiar magnetic properties. This insulating phase is proposed to be the long-sought "resonating-valence-bond" state or "quantum spin liquid" hypothesized in 1973. This insulating magnetic phase is favored by low spin, low dimensionality, and magnetic frustration. The preexisting magnetic singlet pairs of the insulating state become charged superconducting pairs when the insulator is doped sufficiently strongly. View quote
Philip Warren Anderson
That Big Science culture in the USA, and similar groups elswhere, tended to have separate, direct access to government and hence to funding sources. It was independent to a great extent of the rest of science, of which it was never a majority component except in funding. View quote
Philip Warren Anderson
Surely there are more levels of organization between human ethology and DNA than there are between DNA and quantum electrodynamics, and each level can require a whole new conceptual structure. View quote
Philip Warren Anderson
The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of a few particles. Instead, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other. View quote
Philip Warren Anderson
The field of quantum valence fluctuations was another older interest which became much more active during this period, partly as a consequence of my own efforts. View quote
Philip Warren Anderson
I have also testified repeatedly and published some articles in favor of Small Science. View quote
Philip Warren Anderson
An important impression was my father's one Sabbatical year, spent in England and Europe in 1937. View quote
Philip Warren Anderson
The years since the Nobel Prize have been productive ones for me. (Philip Warren Anderson)
The prize seemed to change my professional life very little. View quote
Philip Warren Anderson
The Nobel Prize gives one the opportunity to take public stands. View quote
Philip Warren Anderson
One of our brainchildren is a still viable Science and Society course. View quote
Philip Warren Anderson