Ford Motor Company Distinguished Lecture in Physics

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Robert B. Laughlin, Physics Nobel laureate and the Robert M. and Anne Bass Professor of Physics at Stanford University, gave the 2004 Ford Motor Company Distinguished Lecture in Physics on Wednesday, March 31, 2004 The lecture was in 1324 East Hall Auditorium at 4:15 p.m. The Reception preceded at 3:45 p.m., first floor East Hall Atrium

The Emergent Age

The natural world is regulated both by fundamental laws and by powerful principles of organization that flow out of them which are also transcendent, in that they would continue to hold even if the fundamentals were changed slightly. This is, of course, an ancient idea, but one that has now been experimentally demonstrated by the stupendously accurate reproducibility of certain measurements - in extreme cases parts in a trillion. This accuracy, which cannot be deduced from underlying microscopics, proves that matter acting collectively can generate physical law spontaneously.

Physicists have always argued about which kind of law is more important - fundamental or emergent - but they should stop. The evidence is mounting that ALL physical law is emergent, notably and especially behavior associated with the quantum mechanics of the vacuum. This observation has profound implications for those of us concerned about the future of science. We live not at the end of discovery but at the end of Reductionism, a time in which the false ideology of the human mastery of all things through microscopics is being swept away by events and reason. This is not to say that microscopic law is wrong or has no purpose, but only that it is rendered irrelevant in many circumstances by its children and its children's children, the higher organizational laws of the world.

More Information About Professor Laughlin

Professor Laughlin received his A.B. at the University of California, Berkeley, and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Following a postdoctoral position at Bell Laboratories, he was a research physicist at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. In 1985, Professor Laughlin joined the Physics Department at Stanford University.

Professor Laughlin is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the recipient of the 1985 E.O. Lawrence Award for Physics, the 1986 Oliver Buckley Prize, and shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics with Horst Stormer and Dan Tsui for his theoretical explication of the fractional quantum Hall effect.

He is the author or coauthor of more than 80 research papers on theoretical condensed matter physics. Currently, his main research interests include contributions to the theory of high temperature superconductivity, including model studies of doped Mott insulators, the first principles computation of spectroscopic quantities such as optical conductivity, magnetic susceptibility, and photoemission spectra, and the development of new mathematical methods based on the fractional quantum Hall effect. These include the use of condensed matter lattice gauge theories, the use of quasiparticles with fractional quantum numbers, and the application of conventional Feynman rules to systems which contain both.

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Professor Laughlin also gave a Condensed Matter Seminar
Quantum Number Fractionalization at Zero-Temperature Phase Transitions:
A Potential Laboratory Analogue of Quark Confinement
Tuesday, March 30 at 4:00 p.m. in 340 West Hall