Philip Warren Anderson: Fact

Philip Warren Anderson is American physicist. Explore interesting quotes on fact.

Philip Warren Anderson: 26 quotes 0 likes

“… 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.”

Philip Warren Anderson

Source: More Is Different (1972), p. 395

Law

“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

in Some ideas on the Aesthetics of Science, address presented by Philip W. Anderson as the Nishina Memorial Lecture at the 50th Anniversary Seminar of the Faculty of Science&Technology, at Keio University (Tokyo), on May 18, 1989.

People , Feeling , Science

“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.”

Philip Warren Anderson

[Four Last Conjectures, 23 March 2018, arXiv.org, https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.11186] (section on "Overlap Currents")

Learning

“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

p. 133 https://books.google.com/books/about/More_and_Different.html?id=tU9yOac455kC&pg=PA133
More and Different: Notes from a Thoughtful Curmudgeon (2011)

Thinking

“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.”

Philip Warren Anderson

[New York Times, 2005-01-04, God (or Not), Physics and, of Course, Love: Scientists Take a Leap, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/science/04edgehed.html?pagewanted=3&ei=5090&en=ce9bddb9581db4d9&ex=1262581200&partner=rssuserland, 2006-08-22]
Anderson was describing his dislike for "string theory".

Fashion , Science