Philip Warren Anderson

Born December 13, 1923, Anderson built a career at the junction of deep theory and material reality. His early work mapped the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems, research rigorous enough to earn him the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physics alongside Nevill Mott and John Van Vleck. A 1962 paper on symmetry breaking in particle physics set concepts in motion that crystallized into the Standard Model about ten years on. He pushed into localization, antiferromagnetism, and later the puzzle of high-temperature superconductivity, always hunting the principles beneath the chaos. He also wrote on emergent phenomena, arguing that more is different - that new laws arise at new scales. He died March 29, 2020, having spent decades insisting physics look at what actually happens when many things interact.