RIP physicist and Nobel laureate Phil Anderson, one of the most accomplished and astute scientists of his time. Not only was he a great condensed matter physicist but a great philosopher of science, arguing against strong reductionism in his 1972 "More is Less" article. 
A remarkably versatile physicist, Anderson contributed to Bell Labs's fame in its days of glory. He won the Nobel for making seminal contributions to a fantastic range of solid-state physics, but he also proposed the symmetry breaking mechanism that anticipated the Higgs boson.
At Bell Labs, Anderson's research into anti-ferromagnetism and disordered systems directly allowed for the development of memory devices in computers. In addition he contributed to an understanding of superfluid helium and helped found the area of spin glasses.
But Anderson was also a noted philosopher of science. His 1972 article "More is Different" was the first salvo in the 'reductionism wars' and argued that the properties of complex systems aren't just the sum of simpler ones. Chemistry is not physics, and biology is not chemistry.
In "More and Different" he wrote about a variety of matters in science and society with characteristic incisiveness, honesty and a pronounced tendency to sway to his own music. I reviewed it here. RIP to a physicist whose versatility was without peer amazon.com/gp/customer-re…
"More is Different", not less: see below.
One of the many funny and insightful things Anderson wrote was this imagining of how miserably Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Dirac would fail in today’s academic world to secure funding and support. I know it hits too close to home for many.
