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A Mind Over Matter Philip Anderson and The Physics of The Very Many Andrew Zangwill Full Chapter PDF
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/11/20, SPi
A MIND OVER
MATTER
Philip Anderson and the Physics
of the Very Many
Andrew Zangwill
Georgia Institute of Technology
1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/11/20, SPi
1
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© Andrew Zangwill 2021
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First Edition published in 2021
Impression: 1
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/11/20, SPi
Prologue
viii Prologue
Prologue ix
x Prologue
Prologue xi
Acknowledgments
xiv Acknowledgments
1
Introduction
2 Introduction
Introduction 3
4 Introduction
Figure 1.1 Philip Warren Anderson in 1988 at age 65. Source: Donn
Forbes.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/11/20, SPi
Introduction 5
6 Introduction
Introduction 7
2 Mark Kac, Enigmas of Chance: An Autobiography (Harper and Row, New York,
1985), p. xxv.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/11/20, SPi
2
Son of the Heartland
3 Interview of Claire and David Jacobus by the author, Princeton, NJ, May 5,
2016.
4 P.W. Anderson, “Growing Up with the Illinois Faculty’s Saturday Hikers”
(unpublished, 2016).
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/11/20, SPi
Formal Education 11
Formal Education
Eleven-year-old Phil Anderson entered the Laboratory High
School of the University of Illinois in the fall of 1935. The quality
of the instruction at this small private high school (nicknamed
“Uni”) was very high. A unique feature—exploited by Anderson—
was the ability to begin with a “sub-freshman” year which con-
solidated the seventh and eighth grades. The annual tuition was
$25 and the students were mostly children of University of Illinois
faculty and wealthy businesspeople.7
Graccie was a senior at Uni when Phil entered as a sub-freshman.
She excelled academically and socially, serving as both the vice-
president of the junior class and president of the senior class.
Later, she majored in chemistry at the University of Illinois,
served as a meteorologist for the US Navy, and earned a PhD in
biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin. The birth of her
children interrupted her plans to work in that field but she later
enjoyed a long and successful career as a scientific librarian, biog-
rapher, and translator.8
Graccie and her brother rarely quarreled. However, as one
might expect of two close and very smart siblings, they main-
tained a healthy intellectual rivalry all their lives. When they
both lived in New Jersey, they raced each other to be the first to
complete a difficult word puzzle which appeared every week in
the Sunday New York Times.
Formal Education 13
worked with vacuum pumps and electric motors, but they were not
taught the laws of physics that made them work. Harnish discussed
gravity in connection with pulleys and falling objects, but he
neglected to point out that gravity also governs the motions of the
planets. His teaching provided not a hint of the unity of the subject.11
Phil compensated by borrowing popular science books from
the school library. His two favorites were The Einstein Theory of
Relativity (1936) by Lillian and Hugh Lieber, and Mr. Tompkins in
Wonderland (1940) by George Gamow. The Liebers were expert at
using cartoons and geometrical diagrams, but they included ser-
ious algebraic manipulations also.
George Gamow was a world-renowned theoretical physicist who
used fiction to introduce modern physics to a popular audience. His
hero, Mr. Tompkins, was a bank clerk who attended physics lectures
at a local university. Each night, he dreamed of a fantastical world
where the usually unseen effects of special relativity, quantum
mechanics, and the curvature of space due to gravity become appar-
ent during the course of daily life. Clever cartoons and a clear presen-
tation of the physics are notable features of Gamow’s book also.
The Lieber and Gamow books leave the reader with a vivid
impression of the interplay between theory and experiment in
physics.12 In light of Phil’s later insistence on the importance of
experiment to guide and inform theory, it is not surprising that
these particular books never left his memory. On the other hand,
much of the material he read from the Uni library differed so much
from what he saw in Harnish’s physics class that he was a college
freshman before he realized they were all part of the same subject.13
The search for connections would be a characteristic feature of his
research for his entire career.
Anderson was a diligent student, and the editors of the school year-
book used the title of an Oscar Wilde play, The Importance of Being Earnest,
as the caption for his 1940 graduation photo. The accompanying
thumbnail biography reveals that he acted in the school play every
year, wrote and read the senior class history at commencement, and
participated in the biology and chess clubs. At graduation, he ranked
first in his class, tied with “three others, one a girl” as his transcript put
it. He earned a grade of “A” in every course except typewriting and
physical education. The latter probably reflects disinterest because he
won the school tennis championship as a junior, competed in the
state track meet as a miler, and was a talented speed skater.
14 Letter from PWA to Liberty Santos, November 17, 1986. Anderson, Philip W.;
Faculty and Professional Staff files, Subgroup 13: P, AC107.13, Princeton
University Archives, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections,
Princeton University Library.
15 Interview of Andrew Maass by the author, June 18, 2017.
16 Harry Anderson’s Diseases of Fruit Crops (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1956) con-
tinues to garner citations in the scientific literature, more than sixty years after
its original publication. Google Search, September 26, 2018.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/11/20, SPi
Informal Education
Peers were important to Anderson and several played a continu-
ing role in his life. One of these was (Henry) Pierre Noyes, a bright
fellow who attended elementary school, high school, and college
with Phil. Pierre became a theoretical physicist also. At some point
before high school, Phil and Pierre began to question the logic
and historicity of the stories presented in the Bible. It was not
long before they rejected religion and embraced atheism, a deci-
sion abetted by both of their fathers. Anderson’s father helped
him resist his mother’s entreaties to attend church services. Years
earlier, Harry had abandoned organized religion in reaction to his
own father’s hellfire and brimstone form of faith.
Pierre’s father (a chemistry professor at the University of
Illinois) did his part by giving the boys a copy of Heavenly Discourse
(1927) by C.E.S. Wood. Wood was a prominent attorney who
defended anarchists like Emma Goldman and other political
radicals. His satirical book records conversations between heav-
enly figures like God, Saint Peter, Jesus, and Satan, and historical
figures like Voltaire, Joan of Arc, Thomas Jefferson, Charles
Darwin, Theodore Roosevelt, and Mark Twain. Heavenly Discourses
aimed its satire at exposing the sanctimonious nature of religious
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/11/20, SPi
Informal Education 17
zealots and decrying the use of religion to justify war.19 Phil and
Pierre took these messages to heart.
Three other high school students, Henry Swain, Philip
Thompson, and Warren Goodell, joined Phil and Pierre to form a
close-knit group of five friends. Thompson, who went on to a dis-
tinguished career in mathematical meteorology, recalled that:
We all had a very strong scientific bent, particularly in mathemat-
ics . . . I think we all learned a great deal from each other because
we were constantly stimulating each other. Through our late
high school days until even in our college days, we had a kind of
mathematical competition in which we would pose problems to
each other . . . Phil Anderson was particularly good at this. He had
a flair . . . to use any method that was available to solve a prob-
lem.20
19 Robert Hamburger, Two Rooms: The Life of Charles Erskine Scott Wood (University
of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 1998).
20 Interview of Philip D. Thompson by Joseph Tribbia and Akira Kashara,
December 15–16 1987, American Meteorological Society, Oral History Project,
accessed June 17, 2017.
21 “On National Socialism and World Relations,” a speech delivered by
Chancellor Adolf Hitler in the German Reichstag on January 30, 1937.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/11/20, SPi
24 David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and
Arguments (Little, Brown, and Company, New York, 1997). Wallace writes about
his upbringing in Philo, Illinois, a small town ten miles from Urbana.
25 Roger L. Geiger, To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research
Universities: 1900–1940 (Oxford University Press, New York, 1986), p. 273. The Big
Four was the popular name of the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, and
St. Louis Railroad.
26 The Anderson family employed an African-American woman when Phil
was an infant and later when they needed occasional help with parties.
27 Janet Andrews Cromwell, History and Organization of the Negro Community in
Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, MS Thesis, Sociology, University of Illinois, 1934.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/11/20, SPi
28 See, e.g., Winton U. Solberg, “The Early Years of the Jewish Presence at the
University of Illinois,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 2(2),
215–45 (1992).
29 The 1948 US Supreme Court case is McCollum v. Board of Education of Champaign
County. Vashti McCollum and her husband John were atheists. John happened
to be a junior faculty colleague of Harry Anderson in the Horticulture
Department of the University of Illinois. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Village Atheists: How
American Unbelievers Made Their Way in a Godly Nation (Princeton University Press,
Princeton, NJ, 2016), pp. 268–71.
30 Raymond Bial, Images of America: Champaign (Arcadia Publishing, Charleston,
SC, 2008).
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 12/11/20, SPi
A Snapshot
Recommendation letters in his Harvard College application file
provide a glimpse into Anderson’s personality and temperament
as a graduating senior (Figure 2.2). The letters come from Charles
Sanford (Principal, University High School), Prof. Wheeler
Loomis (Chair, Physics Department, University of Illinois), and
Prof. William Oldfather (Chair, Classics Department, University
of Illinois). The recommenders were not free from bias—their
purpose was to help Phil gain admission—but their comments
provide some insight nonetheless.
A Snapshot 23
Harry predicts that the Dean will find “Philip a good natured,
even-tempered boy, tolerant of others’ opinions but likely to
defend his own stubbornly.” He then candidly states that:
Philip’s greatest weakness is his inability to make friends easily. He
is not at ease with people who do not interest him. He has never
cultivated the art of getting along with people and appearing to
be interested in them. I think he realizes this weakness and there
is some evidence he is trying to remedy it. He needs training
socially.
3
Making Waves
26 Making Waves
College Accelerated
Anderson attended Harvard because a National Scholarship paid
most of the costs of his tuition, room, and board. These scholar-
ships had been created five years earlier by Harvard’s president,
James Bryant Conant, to make it possible for “boys with superior
intellectual endowment” and a “high development of character
and personality” to attend Harvard.1 The scholarship program pro-
vided a (nearly) full-ride because the cost of tuition, room, and
board at Harvard in 1940 was $924, well above the cost of most other
colleges and well above the means of most American families.2
Sixty percent of the seniors who graduated from Harvard the year
Anderson arrived came from the wealthiest 2.5 percent of the United
1 The Harvard College National Scholarships: A Descriptive Report at the End of Six Years,
(Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1949), pp. 12–16.
2 The corresponding costs at the University of Pennsylvania and the University
of Michigan were $520 and $590, respectively. New York Times, November 14, 1982;
http://www.nytimes.com/1982/11/14/education/paying-for-college-is-working-
your-way-through-still-possible.html?pagewanted=all. Accessed July 9, 2017;
University History, Tuition and Mandated Fees, University Archives and
Records Center, University of Pennsylvania. http://www.archives.upenn.edu/
histy/features/tuition/1940.html. Accessed July 9, 2017; Bulletin of General
Information, University of Michigan, 1940–1941, p. 15.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/11/20, SPi
College Accelerated 27
28 Making Waves
College Accelerated 29
30 Making Waves
15 Official Register of Harvard University 41, No. 23, September 26, 1944. Issue
Containing the Report of the President of Harvard College and Reports of
Departments for 1941–1942, pp. 92–3.
16 Morton Keller and Phyllis Keller, Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America’s
University (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001), p. 106.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/11/20, SPi
College Accelerated 31
32 Making Waves
Project.22 They sent the Electronic Physics majors like Phil, Pierre
Noyes, and Tom Kuhn to radar research facilities like the MIT
Radiation Lab and Harvard’s own Radio Research Laboratory.
Wartime Service
From June 1943 to September 1945, Phil Anderson worked nine
hours a day, six days a week in an antenna group at the Naval
Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, D.C. Anderson’s group
focused primarily on “identify friend or foe” (IFF) radar systems
designed to positively identify Allied aircraft. They also contributed
to the development of countermeasures to disrupt enemy radar
signals. Military events dictated these particular choices of tasks.
The afternoon of the Pearl Harbor attack, the aircraft carrier
USS Enterprise sent out a squadron of Wildcat fighter planes to
search for the Japanese fleet. With night approaching and the air-
craft short of fuel, the Enterprise instructed six of the fighters to
land on Ford Island in Pearl Harbor. This led to tragedy when
American anti-aircraft gunners shot down five of the six fighters.
In the darkness, the gunners lacked a reliable means to distin-
guish the Wildcats from Japanese fighters.
By the time Anderson arrived at NRL, the main goal of the IFF
effort was to develop a radio-radar system to distinguish friendly
aircraft from hostile aircraft that was fast and used separate fre-
quencies for the challenge and reply signals.23 Phil’s team acquired
components and expertise from specialists at Westinghouse, RCA,
Bell Laboratories, Western Electric, General Electric, and DeForest
Radio.24 The quality and reliability of the components and advice
22 The recruiters obfuscated the work that the Physics majors were expected
to do at Los Alamos because the true nature of the Manhattan Project was a
highly guarded secret.
23 Louis A. Gebhard, Evolution of Naval Radio-Electronics and Contributions of the
Naval Research Laboratory (US Naval Research Laboratory, 1979), p. 256.
24 A. Hoyt Taylor, Radio Reminiscences: A Half-Century (US Naval Research
Laboratory, Washington, DC, 1948), p. 164.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/11/20, SPi
Wartime Service 33
1024 1022 10
20
1018 1016 1014 1012 1010 108 106 104 102 100 f (Hz)
10–16 10–14 10–12 10–10 10–8 10–6 10–4 10–2 100 102 104 106 108 λ(m)
“Lady Ritchie knew what was interesting and what was not; she
lived intensely in her memories, and she can take her readers to live
in them with her.”
20–17007
The story is of the Wyoming cattle country at the time when the
struggle for existence was on between the cattle rangers and the
sheep-raising homesteaders. Little by little the latter were
encroaching upon the former’s grazing lands. Three figures stand out
in the tale, Zang Whistler, the cattle-thieving outlaw, Original Bill
Blunt, inspector for the Stockman’s alliance, and Hilma Ring, a
sheepherder’s daughter, a dazzling but heartless beauty. A lonely life
of hardship and struggle had cut her off from all femininity and
hardened her heart. It is the taming of this shrew that tempts both
Zang and Original. Amid killings and rough horse-play, during which
Hilma has her fill of terror, loneliness and despair, nursing her
hatred for Original, the latter’s character and power finally subdue
and awaken the woman in her. Even Zang, whose wild career is but
an offshoot of his inherent integrity, receives Hilma’s recognition of
his loyalty and devotion.
“If these grotesque and morbid tales were just a bit better, they
might even be great! But failing of greatness, they are so horrible as
to be occasionally funny.”
“The horror of the truth in daily life is greater than the horror Mr
Robbins seeks in his imaginative and improbable wanderings among
murderers and spirits.” R. D. W.
“The author has dipped his pen in blood while steeping his literary
ego in diablerie, and the outcome is a feast of melodrama and
morbidity that leads logically to nightmare.”
20–1006
This collection of poems falls into three parts: Poems; The dark
years; and Other poems. John Masefield writes a preface to the
collection and says of the author: “When I think of the poems, I feel
that he must be young; not young enough perhaps to have been
carried away, or destroyed, by the recent great events, but young
enough to see them clearly, to respond to them, and to realize that
the tragedy of them has been the tragedy of the young, the blasting of
the young, for the benefit and at the bidding of the old.... That, in the
main, is the tragedy of Mr Roberts’ latest and best poems, in the
volume here printed.” In another place he says of the poet: “He has a
quick eye for characters, a lively sense of rhythm, and a fondness for
people, which should make his future work as remarkable as his
present promise.”
“These labored verses move us not at all. The book is full of echoes
and infelicitous imitations. The book, in short, is full of clichés of
thought and phrase.” H: A. Lappin
“The many lyric poems are a flower-garden in which the reader can
spend a long time, and to which he will want to return. Mr Roberts
writes gracefully and melodiously, and is never elaborate or
artificial.”
(Eng ed 20–6572)
“It is only the first part of the book, in which Dr Roberts states his
social theory, that in the view of the writer of this note exposes itself
to criticism.” T. M. Ave-Lallemant
19–13978
The author informs his readers that he is tired of being funny, that
he has had a collapse and needs a complete rest, and he is going to
tell about his holiday in the country in his natural serious and solemn
manner. By the skin of his teeth he succeeds in escaping from home
without his wife and the entire family. His haven of rest is the
Sunrise Arms of Little Slocum. The dream and the reality of Little
Slocum are not quite the same. He almost succumbs to the
ministrations of the sewing-bee of Little Slocum mothers, but after a
ten mile flight in pajamas and mackintosh and rubber boots he
catches a train that takes him back to the city. The illustrations by
John Hassall add to the solemnity of the book.
“We cannot say that we have been vastly exhilarated by ‘My rest
cure.’”
20–16280
“‘Old New England houses’ has about one hundred sumptuously
printed views, mostly of the type of plain, unpretentious small
country houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which
we roughly classify as ‘colonial,’ though quite a few of the more
pretentious mansion type of house, such as were built by the
wealthier merchants and shipmasters in the larger coast towns, are
included. The subjects are selected from an artistic rather than an
architectural or antiquarian viewpoint. The first few pages are given
to an untechnical talk on the varied types and styles of houses and
where one may hunt for them with reasonable chance of success, but
the greater part of the book is devoted to the pictures of the houses
themselves, an entire page being usually given to each print.”—
Boston Transcript
Reviewed by W. B. Chase
Reviewed by E. L. Pearson
+ Review 3:314 O 13 ’20 30w
“Like most books of the sort, ‘Old New England houses’ is more to
be valued for its pictures than for its text. Here the text, however, is
entirely adequate as a brief introduction to upward of a hundred
photographs.”
20–12049
“Edwin Arlington Robinson can say more in two lines than most
poets can in several verses. His vision is somber; it is marked by an
uncompromising consistency in the handling of eternal values.” H. S.
Gorman
“It has been well thought out, well felt and well made. This is not
to say that it is a great poem, however, or that no important criticism
can be brought against it. When he draws personality the lines are
firm and flawless. But can he show us the color and texture of life,
and make us feel the heat of it in those old days of myth and magic?”
Marguerite Wilkinson
20–15484
“Edwin Arlington Robinson’s new volume of miscellaneous poems,
‘The three taverns’ is likely to earn him—if he has not already earned
—a reputation as the Henry James among poets. His fondness for
portraying the complex facets of character in an oblique light and by
means of inscrutable hints and sinuous innuendoes has led him to
further workings of the vein of dramatic lyric opened four years ago
by his famous ‘Ben Johnson entertains a man from Stratford.’ The
present collection contains seven long poems of this sort, revealing in
monolog or dialog a moment in the life of St Paul, Lazarus, Brown of
Harper’s ferry, Hamilton, and real or imagined people of lesser
note.”—Springf’d Republican
“‘The man against the sky’ indicated very clearly the place of the
poet, it was very high—how high we had not the standards by which
to measure. ‘The three taverns’ brings us much nearer to him, closer
within the embrace of his sympathies, and, by the same law, lifts him
much farther above us.” S: Roth
“Mr Robinson’s verse, as always, flows with limpid purity, but his
quaintly compounded vocabulary and his intellectual penetration
compel the closest attention to his pages. Readers who have the
patience or the agility to follow Mr Robinson are not meanly
rewarded.”
20–16520
20–12599
A story of the last days of the war and the period immediately
following. The scene is laid in a village of Lorraine. Here Daniel
Steele, an American Friend who has come to France to do relief and
reconstruction work, falls under the spell of Joan le Jeune, the maid
of Mirabelle. When Daniel had left home he had taken with him the
promise of his foster-sister Faith to be his wife on his return. But for
a little time Joan makes him forget Faith, and Joan, to whom he
brings the romance of strange lands, almost forgets her own soldier
lover Jean. But when Jean is under suspicion she turns to him, and
Daniel, too, recovering from a wound, finds his thoughts bound up in
Faith and is ready to return to his own country leaving Joan to her
happiness.
20–2645
“In construction the present story is by far the best he has written.”
20–17881