Philip Warren Anderson Quotes

6 Sourced Quotes

It is seen as the application of a systematic scientific method involving wearing a white coat and being dull. I feel that too many young people come into science with this view, and that too many fields degenerate into the kind of work which results: automatic crank-turning and data-collecting of the sort which Kuhn calls normal science and Rutherford stamp-collecting. In fact, the creation of new science is a creative act, literally, and people who are not creative are not very good at it.

Philip Warren Anderson
We atheists can... argue that, with the modern revolution in attitudes toward homosexuals, we have become the only group that may not reveal itself in normal social discourse.

Philip Warren Anderson
Of course I am not religious—I don't in fact see how any scientist who thinks at all deeply can be so.

Philip Warren Anderson
Feynman's cryptic remark, "no one is that much smarter...," to me, implies something Feynman kept emphasizing: that the key to his achievements was not anything "magical" but the right attitude, the focus on nature's reality, the focus on asking the right questions, the willingness to try (and to discard) unconventional answers, the sensitive ear for phoniness, self-deception, bombast, and conventional but unproven assumptions.

Philip Warren Anderson
My belief is based on the fact that string theory is the first science in hundreds of years to be pursued in pre-Baconian fashion, without any adequate experimental guidance.

Philip Warren Anderson
The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.

Philip Warren Anderson