R.I.P. Phil Anderson (1923-2020)
I heard this morning via a friend who knew him personally of the death, yesterday at the age of 96, of condensed matter physicist and Nobel Laureate Professor Philip Warren Anderson. He will perhaps be best remembered known for Anderson Localization but he worked on a huge range of topics in physics and his influence was felt across many branches of science (including astrophysics). It’s too early for obituaries to have been published yet but I will add links when they become available.
Update: here is the New York Times obituary.
R.I.P. Philip W Anderson (1923-2020).
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In the Dark 
March 30, 2020 at 5:40 pm
Oh. That’s a loss. The virus? Or something else? A personal friend died in Cambridge two Thursdays ago (not of covid19 or complications thereof) and of course I’m unable to attend the funeral.
Phil Anderson became Bayesian 2 or 3 decades ago and was a fine advocate for it. Time will tell if his explanation of high-temperature superconductivity was the better of the two main schools of thought. he proposed it withing months of its discovery but that was 33 years ago. Slow progress!
Re the virus, the media are saying two things at once:
1. If you catch covid-19 then expect to die horribly [the panic line]
2. Many people have it asymptomatically, so stay in to avoid the risk of infecting others.
As these appear to be totally incompatible, most people are confused. Worse, they don’t even realise they are confused – they are liable to say (1) at one moment and (2) at another without thought to how these can both be true. The missing piece of the jigsaw is that the virus alone gives rise to only mild symptoms, but fighting it depresses your immune system and renders you more liable to bacteriological infection in the lungs that (perhaps in conjunction with the virus) can have dire effects. Professional medics regard the notion of opportunistic post-viral bacterial infections, when someone’s immune system is temporarily depleted, as so basic that they don’t explain this, and the media haven’t a clue, so people are not getting information that they are quite capable of understanding and which could set many minds at rest. The bacteria in this case are treatable by the antibiotics amoxicillin and clarithromycin (or doxycycline for persons allergic to penicillin). The first symptoms would be recurring fever, cough, shortness of breath and chest tightness; and speed in receiving the antibiotics, and case history (to try to check it follows covid19), are of the essence. The preceding two sentences came directly from a medic I know personally, and the earlier ones are my summary of what else was told me.
I also wonder if the differing death rates in differing places are because the bacteria, not covid19, are directly responsible for the Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome that causes death, and differing conventions over logging cause of death in differing countries.
March 30, 2020 at 7:44 pm
I don’t know about the medical bit so I can’t comment, but it is sadly reminiscent of AIDS. The course of death of those I knew who passed away as a result of that was often pneumonia, an opportunistic infection.
March 30, 2020 at 8:24 pm
The UK’s official death count from Covid-19 includes only those who tested positive for Coronavirus in hospital and died there. It excludes those who died at home or in a care home. It’s difficult to estimate the number missed without including other data, which is what I think they are going to start doing tomorrow.
March 30, 2020 at 9:22 pm
There was an article in Lancet about the characteristics of COVID-19 based on a sample of a few hundred cases. About 50% of those who died of the disease had also secondary bacterial infection. Saying that the virus alone only gives rise to mild symptoms seems a bit of an exaggeration…
March 30, 2020 at 10:15 pm
I’m willing to be corrected. By what mechanism (choosing my words carefully) was death caused in the other 50%, please?
March 30, 2020 at 10:16 pm
I was careful not to say that (1) and (2) are incompatible. In the early days of the coming of covid19, (1) was frequently bandied around by alarmist sources.
March 30, 2020 at 9:24 pm
Gloves are to prevent transmission to others…
My local supermarket puts out plastic gloves for customer use. The idea is you wear them to avoid directly handling items. Unfortunately the gloves they supply are meant for people with smaller hands than me and I can’t get my mitts into them.
March 31, 2020 at 11:24 am
If you have the virus and you touch your mouth or face you might well get it on your hands.
March 31, 2020 at 2:50 pm
This is sad news.
I associate him with developing the first version of what we now call the Higgs-Englert-Brout mechanism. His version was non-relativistic but captured the central picture well.
I remember being in a meeting at which we were discussing who should be receiving a prize that the organisation was giving out following the Higgs discovery. I suggested Anderson. This was met by silence, for two related factors: his contribution is overlooked and he was no friend of high energy particle physics. He campaigned against the construction of large collider (SSC) in the States, helping to cause its cancellation. He also, politically incorrectly, referred to particle physicists on large collaborations (such as myself) as “spear throwers”.
April 1, 2020 at 8:43 am
“Pool players at c” might be better?