Philip Anderson, Nobel laureate in physics, dies at 96

Philip Anderson died Sunday at the Princeton Windrows retirement community in Princeton, New Jersey, his daughter said. No cause was reported.

Philip Anderson, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who expanded the world’s understanding of magnetism and superconductivity, has died. He was 96.

Philip Anderson graduated from Harvard in 1949 and then worked for Bell Telephone Laboratories until he began teaching at Princeton and the University of Cambridge.(princeton/edu)

Anderson died Sunday at the Princeton Windrows retirement community in Princeton, New Jersey, his daughter said. No cause was reported.

He researched the electronic behavior of solid materials such as glass, crystal and alloys, The New York Times reported.

Bogdan Andrei Bernevig, a Princeton professor of physics, said in a statement that Anderson will be known as the man who started solid state physics as a field.

Bernevig described Anderson as complex and said that “I was always in awe of his intellect. He was working on theories for regular days well into his 90s.”

Anderson graduated from Harvard in 1949 and then worked for Bell Telephone Laboratories until he began teaching at Princeton and the University of Cambridge.

During his career in academia, Anderson advised another Nobel Prize winner, F. Duncan Haldane, who won the 2016 prize in physics. Anderson inspired another winner, Brian Josephson, who won the 1973 Nobel Prize and took a class taught by Anderson at Cambridge.

Anderson was drafted during World War II into the Navy and assigned to work at the U.S. Naval Research Lab.