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Philip Anderson

Philip Anderson was an American theoretical physicist who worked at Bell Laboratories, Cambridge and Princeton and shared the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physics for…

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Also known as Philip W. Anderson, P. W. Anderson

1923 – 2020 · Murray Hill, New Jersey (Bell Labs); Cambridge; Princeton

Traditions: Analytic

Philip Anderson was an American theoretical physicist who worked at Bell Laboratories, Cambridge and Princeton and shared the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physics for work on the electronic structure of disordered and magnetic systems. Among philosophers he is known for the 1972 essay "More Is Different", which argued that the reducibility of everything to fundamental laws does not mean that complex systems can be reconstructed from those laws, because each new level of complexity brings new properties and needs new concepts.

Key ideas

  • Reductionism does not imply constructionism: knowing the basic laws does not let us rebuild the higher-level world from them.
  • Broken symmetry produces genuinely new behaviour at each level of organisation.
  • Each level of science (chemistry, biology, psychology) requires its own concepts and is as fundamental in its own way.
  • Condensed matter physics shows emergence as an ordinary feature of physical systems.

Major works

  • "More Is Different" (1972)
  • Concepts in Solids (1963)
  • Basic Notions of Condensed Matter Physics (1984)

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