Philip Anderson, legendary Nobel winner whose ideas shaped modern physics, dies

Philip Anderson, the theoretical physicist whose ideas reshaped condensed matter physics and stretched to the forefront of other fields, died yesterday in Princeton, New Jersey.

The theorist was 96. Anderson had spent the past 45 years at Princeton University, which confirmed his death in a statement, Sciencemag.org reports.

Feisty and cantankerous, Anderson made contributions that rival those of famed American theorist Richard Feynman, who died in 1988, says Michael Norman, a theorist at Argonne National Laboratory: “Phil was a true giant of physics, one of the greatest ever.”

Anderson established himself in the 1950s by showing how disorder in the arrangement of atoms in a crystal could trap otherwise free-flowing electrons in a definite spot, a quantum effect called Anderson localization, for which he shared the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physics. The phenomenon is much deeper than it may sound, as it requires the quantum wave of the electron to overlap and interfere with itself to keep it from spreading.