A Mind Over Matter

A Mind Over Matter is an important book of interest not only to physicists but also to many historians and philosophers of science. Apart from providing a comprehensive review of Anderson’s life and science. * Helge Kragh, Metascience *A lucid biography of one of the great twentieth-century scientists, and also a skeleton-key for readers interested in the physics of complex systems. * David Kordahl, 3 Quarks Daily *Zangwill’s well-written and engaging A Mind Over Matter is an important book of interest not only to physicists but also to many historians and philosophers of science. * Helge Kragh, Metascience *Zangwill has done an admirable job in capturing the character of Anderson, accurately depicting his flaws as well as his enormous strengths. Moreover, the book is very well written […]. It should clearly be of great interest to anyone who has done research in the area of condensed matter physics, or has seriously studied that subject. But it should also be of interest to many others, including people with a broad interest in the history of science and the evolution of physics in the second half of the twentieth century. * Bertrand Halperin, Harvard University *The book is great, extremely interesting and well written. It should appeal to thinking scientists and academics quite widely, and it captures the spirit of a leading figure in theoretical physics. In particular I like the discussion of Anderson’s ‘style’ of doing theoretical physics in line with his whole ethos and what he thinks science is about. * Volker Heine, Cambridge University *Well-researched, nicely balanced and refreshingly non-hagiographic. * Anthony Leggett, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign *

Professor Zangwill earned a B.S. in Physics at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1976. His 1981 PhD in Physics at the University of Pennsylvania introduced the time-dependent density functional method. He worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn from 1981-1985 before taking up his present position at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1997 for theoretical studies of epitaxial crystal growth. He is the author of the monograph Physics at Surfaces (1988) and the graduate textbook Modern Electrodynamics (2013). In 2013, he began publishing scholarly work on the history of condensed matter physics.