The Unity of Physics: From New Materials to Fundamental Laws of Nature by David Tong, Cambridge

There is a wonderful and surprising unity to the laws of physics. Ideas and concepts developed in one area of physics often turn out to have application in totally different areas. The underlying reason for this can be traced to the work of the great physicist, Kenneth Wilson. In the 1970s, Wilson laid down a framework that allows us to understand many aspects of the world around us, from the Higgs boson, to boiling water, to the way that flocks of starlings swarm at dusk. This talk will first describe a number of examples where seemingly disparate phenomena have the same underlying description. We will then go on to describe the Wilsonian paradigm as a way to impose some organizational order on the universe and its contents.