Philip Warren Anderson Quotes

The years since the Nobel Prize have been productive ones for me.

One of our brainchildren is a still viable Science and Society course.

I have also testified repeatedly and published some articles in favor of Small Science.

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.

The Nobel Prize gives one the opportunity to take public stands.

A souvenir of those years is a small cottage on the cliffs of Cornwall, where Joyce and I spend a spring month every year, hiking and seeing friends.

Feynman's cryptic remark, "no one is that much smarter ...," to me, implies something Feynman kept emphasizing: that the key to his achievements was not anything "magical" but the right attitude, the focus on nature's reality, the focus on asking the right questions, the willingness to try (and to discard) unconventional answers, the sensitive ear for phoniness, self-deception, bombast, and conventional but unproven assumptions.

The prize seemed to change my professional life very little.

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.

The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.

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.

I acquired an admiration for Japanese culture, art, and architecture, and learned of the existence of the game of GO, which I still play.

Although raised on the farm - my grandfather was an unsuccessful fundamentalist preacher turned farmer - my father and his brother both became professors.