Philip Warren Anderson
1923–2020, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA, Princeton, New Jersey, USA
American theoretical physicist, father of modern condensed matter theory, who discovered Anderson localization and the Anderson-Higgs mechanism of gauge symmetry breaking.
A wartime radar engineer and postwar Bell Labs theorist trained under Van Vleck, Anderson reshaped solid-state physics: he explained spin-wave spectra, showed how disorder localizes electron waves, and understood that a broken-symmetry condensate makes a gauge field massive — the physics later embodied in the Higgs mechanism. His 1972 essay 'More Is Different' argued that collective phenomena cannot be trivially reduced to particle physics.
Nobel-winning work
Anderson's 1977 Nobel Prize honored 'fundamental theoretical investigations of the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems'. His 1958 analysis showed that electrons in a sufficiently disordered lattice do not diffuse at all — their wavefunctions become exponentially localized — creating a sharp 'mobility edge' between conducting and insulating states.
He also derived how magnetic impurities retain moments in metals and gave the first microscopic account of the Meissner effect via a massive gauge field. These ideas underpin the modern understanding of insulators, spin glasses and symmetry breaking across all of physics.
Workplaces: Princeton University, Bell Telephone Laboratories
United States