Under the encouragement of a math teacher by the name of Miles Hartley, Anderson enrolled at Harvard University to study under a fully-funded scholarship.

After the war, Anderson returned to Harvard to pursue graduate studies in physics under the mentorship of John Hasbrouck van Vleck; he received his Ph.D. in 1949 after completing a doctoral dissertation titled "The theory of pressure broadening of spectral lines in the microwave and infrared regions.

During this period he developed what is now called Anderson localization (the idea that extended states can be localized by the presence of disorder in a system) and Anderson's theorem (concerning impurity scattering in superconductors); invented the Anderson Hamiltonian, which describes the site-wise interaction of electrons in a transition metal; proposed symmetry breaking within particle physics (this played a role in the development of the Standard Model and the development of the theory behind the Higgs mechanism, which in turn generates mass in some elementary particles); created the pseudospin approach to the BCS theory of superconductivity; made seminal studies of non-s-wave pairing (both symmetry-breaking and microscopic mechanism) in the superfluidity of helium-3, and helped found the area of spin-glasses.

[19] Anderson's writings included Concepts in Solids, Basic Notions of Condensed Matter Physics and The Theory of Superconductivity in the High-Tc Cuprates.

Anderson served on the board of advisors of Scientists and Engineers for America, an organization focused on promoting sound science in American government.

[20] In response to the discovery of high-temperature superconductors in the 1980s, Anderson proposed Resonating valence bond (RVB) theory to explain the phenomenon.

In 1972, he wrote an article called "More is Different" in which he emphasized the limitations of reductionism and the existence of hierarchical levels of science, each of which requires its own fundamental principles for advancement.

[23] Anderson also co-chaired the institute's 1987 conference on economics with Kenneth Arrow and W. Brian Arthur, and participated in its 2007 workshop on models of emergent behavior in complex systems.