Philip Warren Anderson: System

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

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

“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?”

Philip Warren Anderson

Source: More Is Different (1972), p. 394

Law , Idea , Question , Study

“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