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Four Facts Everyone Ought to Know about Science: The Two-Culture Concerns of Philip W. Anderson

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Abstract

Lay people have a large appetite for information about scientific and technological issues that affect them, such as self-driving automobiles, gene manipulation, and climate change. However, this information must be clear and accurate if they are to use it to make informed political decisions. In 1994, the Nobel prize–winning physicist Philip W. Anderson used a newspaper essay to convey his concerns about the fidelity of the communication channels that connect the public to the creators of technical knowledge. He also suggested strategies to improve the quality of that communication. We analyze that essay and other writings by Anderson to identify the origins of his concerns and to place them in the larger context of his scientific philosophy.

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Photo/Credit: Peter Badge/Typos 1 in cooperation with Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings

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References

  1. The Daily Telegraph is a national newspaper similar to the Wall Street Journal in the United States.

  2. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959); F. R. Leavis, Two Cultures?: The Significance of C. P. Snow (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962).

  3. See, for example, Roger Kimball, “The Two Cultures Today,” The New Criterion 12, no. 6 (1994), 10; Robert Whelan, “Fifty Years on, C. P. Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’ are United in Desperation,” Daily Telegraph, May 5, 2009; Guy Ortolano, The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

  4. The story of the creation of the discipline of solid state physics is told in Joseph D. Martin, Solid State Insurrection: How the Science of Substance made American Physics Matter (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018).

  5. Anderson shared his Nobel Prize with his former PhD advisor, John Van Vleck, and the English solid state physicist Nevill Mott. Elihu Abrahams, ed., 50 Years of Anderson Localization (New Jersey: World Scientific, 2010).

  6. Philip W. Anderson, Basic Notions of Condensed Matter Physics (Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin Cummings, 1984).

  7. Philip W. Anderson, “More is Different: Broken Symmetry and the Nature of the Hierarchical Structure of Science,” Science 177, no. 4047 (1972), 393–96.

  8. Reuben Ablowitz, “The Theory of Emergence,” Philosophy of Science 6, no. 1 (1939), 1–16.

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  10. Anderson, “More is Different” (ref. 7).

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  12. Robert B. Laughlin, A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics form the Bottom Down (New York: Basic, 2008), xv. See also, R. B. Laughlin and David Pines, “The Theory of Everything,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97, no. 1 (2000), 28–31.

  13. Philip W. Anderson, “Spin Glass Hamiltonians: A Bridge between Biology, Statistical Mechanics and Computer Science,” in Emerging Synthesis in Science, ed. David Pines, 17–20 (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1984).

  14. Philip Anderson, “The Case Against the SSC,” The Scientist, June 1, 1987, accessed July 17, 2018, http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/8688/title/The-Case-Against-the-SSC/.

  15. Michael Riordan, Lillian Hoddeson, and Adrienne W. Kolb, Tunnel Visions: The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

  16. Philip W. Anderson, More and Different: Notes from a Thoughtful Curmudgeon (Singapore: World Scientific, 2011).

  17. Anderson’s peer in this choice of subject matter and in the depth of his thinking about science is the particle physicist Steven Weinberg. See Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientist’s Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992) and Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

  18. This list is our paraphrase. It is unclear whether the slightly different list printed in the Daily Telegraph came from Anderson himself or was the work of a headline writer.

  19. Philip W. Anderson, “Review: Science Observed: Essays Out of My Mind by Jeremy Bernstein,” Physics Today 35, no. 9 (1982), 79.

  20. Philip W. Anderson, private communication with the author, July 1, 2018.

  21. Philip W. Anderson, “The Resonating Valence Bond State in La2CuO4 and Superconductivity,” Science 235, no. 4793 (1987), 1196–98.

  22. Philip W. Anderson, “A Battery of Smoking Guns (For the Non-Fermi Liquid Interlayer Theory of High T c Cuprates,” Journal of the Physics and Chemistry of Solids 56, no. 12 (1995), 1593–96. This theory differs considerably from the one offered in Anderson, “Resonating Valence Bond State” (ref. 21).

  23. P. W. Anderson, private communication with the author, September 20, 2018.

  24. These are the words of Anderson’s colleague, Steven Weinberg, in “Without God,” New York Review of Books, September 25, 2008.

  25. Anjan Chakravartty, “Scientific Realism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2017), ed. Edward N. Zalta, accessed August 4, 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/scientific-realism/.

  26. Robert P. Crease, “This Is Your Philosophy,” Physics World, April 2002, 15–17.

  27. Philip W. Anderson, “On the Nature of Physical Laws,” Physics Today 43, no. 12 (1990), 9.

  28. Philip W. Anderson, “Science: A ‘Dappled World’ or a ‘Seamless Web’?,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 32, no. 3 (2001), 487–94. This is a review of Nancy Cartwright, The Dappled World: Essays on the Perimeter of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

  29. Philip W. Anderson, “Review: Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Random House, New York, 1995),” The Times Higher Education Supplement, May 24, 1996, 21.

  30. Mike S. Schafer, “How Changing Media Structures are Affecting Science News Coverage,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Science of Science Communication, ed. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Dan Kahan, and Dietram A. Scheufele, 51–59 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

  31. Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), chs. 2 and 6.

  32. Nan Li, Natalie Jomini Stroud, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “Overcoming False Causal Attribution: Debunking the MMR-Autism Association” in Jamieson et al., eds., Oxford Handbook (ref. 30), 433–43.

  33. Philip W. Anderson, “No Facts, Just the Right Answers,” The Times Higher Education Supplement, December 23, 2005. This is a review of Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (New York: Basic Books, 2005).

  34. Philip W. Anderson, “Letter to the Editor,” The Sciences 39, no. 4 (1999), 3. This is a letter to the editor in response to Margaret Wertheim, “The Odd Couple,” The Sciences 39, no. 2 (1999), 38.

  35. Philip W. Anderson, “Postmodernism, Politics and Religion,” Physics World, August 2008, 40–41. The notion of “non-overlapping magisteria” is due to Steven Jay Gould, Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine, 1999).

  36. Philip W. Anderson, “Rebellious Thoughts,” Physics World, April 2007, 42. This is a review of Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel (New York: NYRB Collections, 2006).

  37. Steven Weinberg, “A Designer Universe?,” New York Review of Books, October 21, 1999.

  38. Barry Barnes, David Bloor, and John Henry, Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). For a critique of this book by a theoretical physicist, see N. D. Mermin, “The Science of Science: A Physicist Reads Barnes, Bloor, and Henry,” Social Studies of Science 28, no. 4 (1998), 603.

  39. Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, The Golem: What Everyone Should Know about Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

  40. Philip W. Anderson, “More is Different—One More Time,” in More is Different. Fifty Years of Condensed Matter Physics, ed. N. Phuan Ong and Ravin N. Bhatt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), ch. 1.

  41. Philip W. Anderson, “Some Ideas on the Aesthetic of Science,” in Nishina Memorial Lectures: Creators of Modern Physics, Lecture Notes in Physics 746, 235–44 (Heidelberg: Springer 2008). Reprinted in Philip W. Anderson, A Career in Theoretical Physics, 569–83 (Singapore: World Scientific, 1994).

  42. An example from Anderson’s own field of solid state physics is Les Johnson and Joseph E. Meany, Graphene: The Superstrong, Superthin, Superversatile Materials That Will Revolutionize the World (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2018).

  43. Oxford English Dictionary. Available online at www.oed.com.

  44. See the first paragraph of Philip W. Anderson, “Shadows of Doubt,” Nature 372 (1994), 288–89. Hawking’s inaugural talk occurred on April 29, 1980.

  45. W. Hawking, “Is the End in Sight for Theoretical Physics?,” Physics Bulletin 32, no. 1 (1981), 15–17.

  46. By 1980, the degenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis had impaired Hawking’s speech to the point where he asked his graduate student, Christopher Pope, to deliver the Lucasian inaugural lecture for him. Hawking did not share with Pope his reason for including the final paragraph, but Pope reports that Hawking “often liked to finish off a talk in a slightly jokey or whimsical way.” Christopher Pope, private communication with the author, July 1, 2018.

  47. Tom Lean, Electronic Dreams: How 1980s Britain Learned to Love the Computer (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), ch. 3.

  48. Alok Aggarway, “The Birth of Artificial Intelligence and the First AI Hype Cycle,” 2018, accessed July 24, 2018, https://www.kdnuggets.com/2018/02/birth-ai-first-hype-cycle.html.

  49. Daniel Crevier, AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 22–25; Margaret A. Boden, Mind as Machine. A History of Cognitive Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), section 10.iii.a.

  50. Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgement to Calculation (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976), 1–16.

  51. A recent study estimated the probability as 0.004 that a computer could replace a human psychologist at some point in the future. The same study estimated the probability as 0.1 that a computer could replace a human physicist. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael O. Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerization?,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 114 (2017), 254–80.

  52. Carl Sagan, “In Praise of Robots,” Natural History 84, no. 1 (1975), 8–20.

  53. John R. Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, no. 3 (1980), 417–57; Carl McBride, “Scientists in silico?,” ArXiv, November 2, 2017, accessed July 26, 2018, https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.00678.

  54. John R. Searle, “Is the Brain’s Mind a Computer Program?,” Scientific American, January 1990, 26–31.

  55. Anderson, “Shadows of Doubt” (ref. 44). This is a review of Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

  56. Sidney Fernbach and A. H. Taub, eds., Computers and Their Role in the Physical Sciences (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1970).

  57. K. V. Roberts, “Computers and Physics,” in Computing as a Language of Physics, 3–26 (Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 1972).

  58. John C. Slater, Solid State and Molecular Theory: A Scientific Biography (New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1975); S. S. Schweber, “The Young John Clarke Slater and the Development of Quantum Chemistry,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 20, no. 2 (1990), 339–406.

  59. Philip W. Anderson, “Nevill Mott, John Slater, and the Magnetic State,” in Anderson, More and Different (ref. 16), 120–30.

  60. Philip W. Anderson, “They Think It’s All Over,” Times Higher Education Supplement, September 27, 1996. This is a review of John Horgan, The End of Science (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1996).

  61. The editors of La Recherche commissioned Anderson to write an article from the point of view of a participant in the great events of solid state physics in the years 1950–1980. He responded with an essay titled “The Great Solid State Physics Dream Machine,” which the editors translated, edited heavily, and published in their January 1980 issue as “La Grande Illusion des Physiciens.” The original English manuscript circulated widely at the time.

  62. Philip W. Anderson, “Local Moments and Localized States,” Reviews of Modern Physics 50, no. 2 (1978), 191–202.

  63. The authors thank Mohit Randeria of Ohio State University for bringing the Picasso lithograph to our attention in this connection.

  64. P. A. M. Dirac, “Quantum Mechanics of Many-Electron Systems,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London A 123, no. 792 (1929), 714–33.

  65. Philip W. Anderson, private communication with the author, November 1, 2016. James Gleick, “Discoveries Bring a ‘Woodstock’ for Physics,” New York Times, March 20, 1987, 1.

  66. Margaret A. Boden, Mind as Machine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006); Alok Aggarwal, “The Current Hype Cycle in Artificial Intelligence,” accessed July 29, 2018, https://scryanalytics.ai/the-current-hype-cycle-in-artificial-intelligence/.

  67. David Silver, Julian Schrittwieser, Karen Simonyan, Ioannis Antonoglou, Aja Huang, Arthur Guez, Thomas Hubert, Lucas Baker, et al., “Mastering the Game of Go without Human Knowledge,” Nature 550 (2017), 354–59.

  68. A sober view of the current status and future prospects of deep learning is Gary Marcus, “Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal,” ArXiv, accessed July 29, 2018, https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.00631.

  69. Philip W. Anderson, private communication with the author, September 19, 2017.

  70. Michael Schmidt and Hod Lipson, “Distilling Free-Form Natural Laws from Experimental Data,” Science 324, no. 5923 (2009), 81–85.

  71. Philip W. Anderson and Elihu Abrahams, “Machines Fall Short of Revolutionary Science,” Science 324, no. 5934 (2009), 1515–16. Abrahams is a theoretical physicist with whom Anderson has worked on and off for fifty years.

  72. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Road Since Structure, ed. James Conant and John Haugeland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Kuhn and Anderson were physics classmates at Harvard University as both undergraduates and graduate students.

  73. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2011). See also Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Dan Kahan, and Dietram A. Scheufele, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Science of Science Communication (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), chs. 39 and 41.

  74. Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1954); Joel Best, Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why Some Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t (New York: Penguin Press, 2012).

  75. Sharon Bertsch McGrayne recounts the colorful history of Bayesianism in The Theory that Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, & Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).

  76. Anderson, “Science: A ‘Dappled World’?” (ref. 28).

  77. Silver, Signal and the Noise (ref. 74), 249; Harold Jeffreys, Theory of Probability, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), 29.

  78. Anderson has argued that a Bayesian analysis inevitably leads to a very small probability for the existence of God, no matter how large your prior belief in God might be. This so because the Ockham’s razor character of the method reduces the predicted probability for God every time one introduces a new parameter into the analysis. The problem is that the number of these new parameters can be very large. Does God have a long grey beard? Is God benevolent? Is God malicious? Does God impose dietary restrictions? See Anderson’s response to the 2006 Edge.org question, “What is Your Dangerous Idea?,” accessed August 2, 2018, https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-dangerous-idea.

  79. This is a paraphrase of a similar paragraph in Richard P. Feynman, The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1998), 67–68. The contents of this book were transcribed posthumously from audio tapes of three public lectures given in 1963.

  80. B. Efron, “Why Isn’t Everyone a Bayesian?,” The American Statistician 40, no. 1 (1986), 1–5; Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, The Theory that Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant From Two Centuries of Controversy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).

  81. Philip W. Anderson, private communication with the author, July 31, 2018. Anderson retained a half-time position at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he served as Consulting Director of the Physical Research Laboratory from 1976 to 1984.

  82. Steven Schultz, “Robert Jahn, Pioneer of Deep Space Propulsion and Mind-Machine Interactions Dies at 87,” Princeton University Office of Engineering Communications, accessed July 31, 2018, https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/11/30/robert-jahn-pioneer-deep-space-propulsion-and-mind-machine-interactions-dies-87.

  83. Douglas J. Matzke and Loren L. Howard, “A Review of Psychical Research at SRI and Princeton University,” Technical Report EE 85004, January 1985, accessed July 31, 2018, http://www.matzkefamily.net/doug/papers/princeton_research.pdf.

  84. Irving Langmuir, “Pathological Science,” Physics Today 42, no. 10 (1989), 36–48 (transcribed and edited version of a 1953 colloquium at Knolls Research Laboratory); Denis L. Rousseau, “Case Studies in Pathological Science,” American Scientist 80, no. 1 (1992), 54–63.

  85. Harold Jeffreys, Theory of Probability, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961).

  86. J. J. Simpson, “Evidence of Heavy-Neutrino Emission in Beta Decay,” Physical Review Letters 54, no. 17 (1985), 1891–93. Einstein’s energy-mass relation, E = mc 2, permits physicists to report the mass of a subatomic particle in terms of its energy.

  87. Ephraim Fischbach, Daniel Sudarksy, Aaron Szafer, Carrick Talmadge, and S. H. Aronson, “Reanalysis of the Eötvös Experiment,” Physical Review Letters 56, no. 1 (1986), 3–6.

  88. Douglas R. O. Morison, “The Rise and Fall of the 17-keV Neutrino,” Nature 366 (1993), 29–32; Allan Franklin, The Rise and Fall of the Fifth Force: Discovery, Pursuit, and Justification in Modern Physics (New York: American Institute of Physics, 1993).

  89. Philip W. Anderson, “The Reverend Thomas Bayes, Needles in Haystacks, and the Fifth Force,” Physics Today 45, no. 1 (1992), 9–11.

  90. A. Franklin, “The Appearance and Disappearance of the 17-keV Neutrino,” Reviews of Modern Physics 67, no. 2 (1995), 457–90. See also, Allan Franklin, Are There Really Neutrinos? (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 2001).

  91. Allan Franklin and Ephraim Fischbach, The Rise and Fall of the Fifth Force: Discovery, Pursuit, and Justification in Modern Physics, 2nd ed. (Heidelberg: Springer, 2016), 102–7, on 105.

  92. John Ziman, Real Science: What it is and What it Means (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 224. See also, Allan Franklin and Colin Howson, “It Probably is a Valid Experimental Result: A Bayesian Approach to the Epistemology of Experiment,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 19, no. 4 (1988), 419–27.

  93. Peter Galison, Image and Logic. A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

  94. Robert D. Cousins, “The Jeffreys-Lindley Paradox and Discovery Criteria in High-Energy Physics,” Syntheses 194, no. 2 (2017), 395–432; “Why Isn’t Every Physicist a Bayesian?,” American Journal of Physics 63, no. 5 (1995), 398–410.

  95. Nickolas Pappas, “Plato’s Aesthetics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017), ed. Edward N. Zalta, accessed August 2, 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/plato-aesthetics/.

  96. Johannes Kepler, Harmonices Mundi, bk. III, ch. 1, 1618. Quoted in Judith V. Field, “Astrology in Kepler’s Cosmology” in Astrology, Science, and Society. Historical Essays, ed. Patrick Curry (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1987), 123.

  97. James Clerk Maxwell, “On Action at a Distance” in Scientific Papers, vol. 2, ed. W. D. Niven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1890), 322.

  98. Peter Atkins, Galileo’s Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), ch. 6; Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design (New York: Penguin Press, 2015).

  99. Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of Science, and What Comes Next (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Ian Stewart, Why Beauty is Truth: A History of Symmetry (New York: Basic Books, 2007), ch. 16; Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design (New York: Viking, 2015).

  100. John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Annals of Fine Arts, January 1820.

  101. Quoted in Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider, Reality and Scientific Truth: Discussions with Einstein, Von Laue, and Planck (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1980), 74.

  102. P. A. M. Dirac, “The Evolution of the Physicist’s Picture of Nature,” Scientific American, May 1963, 47.

  103. Murray Gell-Mann, “Beauty, Truth and … Physics?,” TED Talk, March 2007, accessed August 2, 2018, https://www.ted.com/talks/murray_gell_mann_on_beauty_and_truth_in_physics. The weak interaction is responsible for some of the behaviors observed for subatomic particles.

  104. Dan Hooper, Nature’s Blueprint: Supersymmetry and the Search for a Unified Theory of Matter and Force (New York: Harper Collins, 2008).

  105. Wilczek, Beautiful Question (ref. 98).

  106. Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999). See also, Smolin, Trouble with Physics (ref. 99).

  107. For a philosophy of science that does not regard the absence of experimental predictions as a disqualifying vice for a scientific theory, see Richard Dawid, String Theory and the Scientific Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

  108. Anderson, “Some Ideas” (ref. 41).

  109. Sabine Hossenfelder, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (New York: Basic Books, 2018), 2.

  110. See Anderson’s response to the 2005 Edge.org question at, “What Do You Believe Is True Though You Cannot Prove It?,” accessed August 2, 2018, https://www.edge.org/responses/what-do-you-believe-is-true-even-though-you-cannot-prove-it.

  111. The fin-de-siècle engineer and social reformer Josef Popper expressed a similar view: “I am certain that both science and technology gratify our perception in the same way art has been doing all along.” Quoted in Ernst Peter Fischer, Beauty and the Beast: The Aesthetic Moment in Science (New York: Plenum, 1999), xiv.

  112. Jean Matricon and Georges Waysand, The Cold Wars: A History of Superconductivity, trans. Charles Glashausser (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003).

  113. The BCS model appears for the first time in John Bardeen, Leon N. Cooper, and J. Robert Schrieffer, “Theory of Superconductivity,” Physical Review 108, no. 5 (1957), 1175–204. A survey of the full BCS theory is the content of R. D. Parks, ed., Superconductivity, 2 vols. (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1969).

  114. Philip W. Anderson, “It’s Not Over ‘till the Fat Lady Sings,” in More and Different (ref. 16), 81–86.

  115. Philip W. Anderson, “It’s Not Over ‘till the Fat Lady Sings,” Abstract HD4, Bulletin of the American Physical Society 32, no. 3 (1987), 620.

  116. The comment “it also must be admitted … that a concept that provides widespread empirical unification will thereby acquire aesthetic value” appears in Stanley Deser, “Truth, Beauty, and Supergravity,” American Journal of Physics 85, no. 11 (2017), 810–11.

  117. Smolin, Trouble with Physics (ref. 99).

  118. Using the aesthetic criterion of “a proper conformity of the parts to one another and to the whole” while still showing “some strangeness in their proportion,” the astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar nominated Einstein’s classical theory of gravitation as “probably the most beautiful of all existing physical theories.” Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, “Beauty and the Quest for Beauty in Science,” Physics Today 32, no. 7 (1979), 25–30.

  119. Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), chs. 22–23; David C. Cassidy, A Short History of Physics in the American Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), ch. 7.

  120. Andrew Zangwill, A Mind Over Matter: The Life and Physics of Philip W. Anderson, unpublished manuscript.

  121. Philip Kitcher, “Good Science, Bad Science, Dreadful Science, and Pseudoscience,” Journal of College Science Teaching 14, no. 3 (1984–1985), 168–73.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Philip Anderson for correspondence and David Joffe for an important remark.

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  1. Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Physics, Atlanta, Georgia, 30332, USA

    Andrew Zhang & Andrew Zangwill

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Correspondence to Andrew Zangwill.

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Andrew Zhang is an undergraduate studying physics and history at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. Andrew Zangwill is a Professor of Physics at the same institution. His current interest is the history of condensed matter physics.

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Zhang, A., Zangwill, A. Four Facts Everyone Ought to Know about Science: The Two-Culture Concerns of Philip W. Anderson. Phys. Perspect. 20, 342–369 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-018-0229-8

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