David Pines (Co-Founder, SFI, Distinguished Research Professor of Physics, U C Davis, Research Professor of Physics, UIUC, and Chief Evangelist and Founding Director Emeritus, Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter)
Abstract. We live in an emergent universe in which interactions between the basic building blocks of matter or individuals and their environment give rise to unpredicted and unexpected emergent collective behavior at every scale. As physicists we seek to use experiment and phenomenology to identify the organizing principles responsible for that behavior and then construct soluble models that incorporate these to explain experiment. In the first part of my talk I will give a preview of my Lilienfeld Prize Lecture on this topic to the American Physical Society in which I will consider the three examples noted in my prize citation: collective modes in electron and helium liquids; the emergence of superconductivity in conventional superconductors, nuclei, neutron stars and the cuprate superconductors; and the emergence of heavy electrons in Kondo lattice materials. I will then discuss the extent to which some of the lessons learned from understanding emergent behavior in quantum matter might be useful as we study emergent behavior in living matter and society at SFI.