Science Quote by Philip Warren Anderson

There is a sly confidence tucked inside Anderson's apparently bland sentence, the kind of self-positioning scientists often prefer to smuggle in under the cover of modest prose. "Another older interest" reads like a casual footnote to a long career, but it also signals continuity: he wants you to see quantum valence fluctuations not as a passing fad, but as a deep thread he kept tugging at until the fabric moved.

The real tell is the architecture of the claim. Agency is distributed - "became much more active during this period" could be chalked up to the field's natural evolution, grant cycles, or new experimental tools. Then Anderson pivots: "partly as a consequence of my own efforts". It's not boastful enough to trigger the community's allergy to ego, yet it's direct enough to establish authorship of momentum. He isn't merely participating; he's activating. In a discipline where credit is both currency and landmine, "partly" is doing diplomatic work, acknowledging other drivers while still staking a clear claim.

Context matters because Anderson made a career out of legitimizing messy, many-body problems that didn't fit neat textbook pictures. Valence fluctuations sit right in that territory: the uneasy, fluctuating identity of electrons in strongly correlated materials, the kind of phenomenon that resists simple reduction. The subtext is a quiet manifesto about influence: great scientific shifts often look, in retrospect, like collective inevitabilities, but they start as someone insisting an "older interest" is still worth fighting for - and then building the intellectual machinery that makes everyone else take it seriously.