Anderson in an interview

He is certainly among the most creative physicists of last century. I find myself resonating with his style in doing physics, with all modesty. This is an excerpt from an interview [http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/23362_1.html]:

How about quantum electro-dynamics?

ANDERSON:

It was too hard for me. I'm not a formalist. I did listen to some of those lectures. I found the formalism forbidding. I only later came to understand that kind of formalism. I'm lazy. I'm mentally lazy. I believe in using only the tools that are necessary for the job. If I've got a serious problem and it's my problem that I have to solve, I'll go on inventing formalism until I find the answer. But in general I avoid the formalism if I possibly can.

KOJEVNIKOV:

Among other physicists, who do you think is the closest to you in style?

ANDERSON:

Well some of them are experimentalists. I've always thought that Nicolaas Bloembergen and I were very similar. He's half a theorist, or say six tenths experimentalist and four tenths theorist, and I'm more like six tenths theorist and four tenths experimentalist. So that's fairly close. This is immodest of me, and I say this with all modesty, but I think Fermi worked the way I worked. He really was focused on the experimental question. And then he would do formalism if he had to solve it. And Van very much so. Van was no formalist. The reason I was rescued from complete ignorance of formalism was that I had these courses from Schwinger, and so I learned the Green's function formulas and some of that aspect of physics. But that was another thing about the nuclear physics. The Schwinger group of students and the few students who were working with Furry, they were focused on formalism. And I wanted to really explain experimental facts. So when Van gave me this problem—