Скачать или смотреть PW Anderson: an epochal figure in physics

Special lecture by T V Ramakrishnan (IISc, Bengaluru) during the mid year meeting of the Academy, 2020.

PW Anderson was perhaps the most significant figure in condensed matter physics in the
second half of the twentieth century. The emergence of solid state physics (which is much
of the content of condensed matter physics) from obscurity in the early 1950s to the
centre stage of Physics is due largely to him. Many of the foundational ideas in the field and
even the name are due to him. In this talk, the speaker sketched Anderson’s life and work
briefly. In the latter, he touched upon Anderson’s work in disordered systems (discovery of
Anderson localization for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1977), magnetism and
superconductivity. Then the speaker mentioned Anderson’s phenomena driven stance in
physics and his emphasis on mechanism. Finally, the speaker outlined Anderson’s revival
of emergence as a basic principle in science, focusing on the example of broken symmetry
in condensed matter physics.