Philip W. Anderson (1923–2020)
American condensed-matter physicist; Nobel Prize in Physics 1977 (for electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems). Professor at Bell Labs and then Princeton. The most influential scientific advocate of hierarchical emergence — “the physicist’s version” of the anti-reductionist argument. 1
“More Is Different” (1972)
His famous 1972 Science paper (177: 393–396, DOI 10.1126/science.177.4047.393) makes the canonical scientific case that:
- Accepted: physical systems ultimately obey the same fundamental physical laws at all levels
- Rejected: the inference that therefore all higher-level sciences can simply be replaced by particle physics
When systems become sufficiently complex and organized, qualitatively new regularities arise at higher levels. His famous formulation: “the whole becomes not only more than but very different from the sum of its parts” — symmetry/violation-of-symmetry shifts, and the hierarchy of levels each with its own laws: fermions → condensed matter → chemistry → biology → psychology → social science. 1
Key points:
- Not an anti-materialist physicist arguing for supernatural properties — a condensed-matter physicist arguing that fundamental physics ≠ complete explanatory vocabulary for all levels of nature
- The argument is epistemic-structural, not dualist: new levels have their own entities, laws, and intuitions; reductionist hubris (“intuition fails at each level”) mistakes the hierarchy of explanation for a hierarchy of importance
- Introduces the levels-hierarchy picture that grounds the modern multi-level view of emergence
Other Landmark Contributions
- Localization (Anderson localization), antiferromagnetism, the RVB model of high-Tc superconductivity
- Self-organized criticality precursor: his student work and the “spin glass” program fed the complexity sciences; he was a co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute
Relationship to This Wiki
- The scientific anchor of emergence — the canonical citation whenever the debate needs a non-dualist scientific authority
- His levels hierarchy is the physical backdrop for multi-level neural explanation on emergence (molecular → cellular → circuit → cognitive → behavioral)
- His “more is different” slogan is the physicist’s counterpart of the non-aggregativity criterion from john-stuart-mill and cd-broad
See Also
- emergence — The concept his paper anchors scientifically
- cd-broad — The philosopher’s classical version
- mark-bedau — Weak emergence as the formalization
- michael-polanyi — Adjacent biological hierarchy argument (boundary conditions)
References
- Anderson, P. W. (1972). “More Is Different.” Science 177(4047): 393–396. DOI: 10.1126/science.177.4047.393 1
- Anderson, P. W. (2011). More and Different: Notes from a Thoughtful Curmudgeon. World Scientific.
- Nobel Prize biography