Nobel Laureate to Give Marker Lecture in Physics on 26 and 27 March

11 March 2003 -- Philip W. Anderson, the 1977 Nobel laureate in physics, will present the 2003 Russell Marker Lectures in Physics on 26 and 27 March on the Penn State University Park campus. The series of two lectures is sponsored by the Department of Physics and the Eberly College of Science.

The series includes a lecture titled "More Is Different," which is intended for a general audience, at 8:00 p.m. on Wednesday, 26 March, in 101 Thomas Building. This lecture is open to the public free of charge and will be followed by a social with a light snack.

The second lecture is a colloquium for scientists given by the Department of Physics, titled "Resonating Valence Bond (RVB): the Plain-Vanilla Version," at 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, 27 March, in 117 Osmond Laboratory. This lecture is preceded by tea in the second floor overpass connecting Davey and Osmond Laboratories.

"Professor Anderson is widely considered to be by far the most influential condensed-matter physicist," says Jainendra Jain, the Erwin W. Mueller Professor of Physics. "His work spanning more than a half century has had a profound, agenda-setting impact on the field of 'condensed matter physics,' which is the name he gave to what earlier was known as 'solid-state' physics." Among Anderson's pioneering contributions are: the theory of Anderson localization, for which he received the 1977 Nobel prize; the Anderson-Higgs mechanism; the theory of spin glass, the prediction of the Anderson-Morel phase of Helium-3 superfluid; the co-discovery of the Josephson effect; the renormalization group theory for the Kondo problem; and numerous aspects of magnetism, broken symmetry, and random statistical systems. In areas other than condensed-matter physics, his work has addressed pulsar glitches, neutron matter, measurement theory, biophysics, neural nets, computers and complexity, and epistemology of science. Over the last decade and a half, his principal research interest has been the problem of high-temperature superconductivity, where his original ideas now are well accepted among researchers in the field.

Anderson has received numerous awards and honors for his wide-ranging contributions, including the Oliver E. Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society in 1964; the Dannie Heinemann Prize of the Academy of Science at Goettingen, Germany, in 1975; the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1977; the Guthrie Medal and Prize in 1978; the National Medal of Science in 1983, and the John Bardeen Prize in 1997; and he has received many honorary degrees. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society in the United Kingdom, and numerous other international academies.

The Marker Lectures were established in 1984 through a gift from the late Russell Earl Marker, professor emeritus of organic chemistry at Penn State, whose pioneering synthetic methods revolutionized the steroid-hormone industry and opened the door to the current era of hormone therapies, including the birth-control pill. The Marker endowment allows the Penn State Eberly College of Science to present annual Marker Lectures in astronomy and astrophysics, the chemical sciences, evolutionary biology, genetic engineering, the mathematical sciences, and physics.

[ J J / A L / B K K ]