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This book surveys the science at a semipopular, Scientific American-level. It is even-handed with regard to competing directions of research and philosophical positions. It is hard to get even two people to agree on anything, yet a million billion water molecules can suddenly and abruptly coordinate to lock themselves into an ice crystal or liberate one another to billow outwards as steam. The marvelous self-organizing capacity of matter is one of the central and deepest puzzles of physics, with implications for all the natural sciences. Physicists in the past century have found a remarkable diversity of phases of matter-and equally remarkable commonalities within that diversity. The pace of discovery has, if anything, only quickened in recent years with the appreciation of quantum phases of matter and so-called topological order. The study of seemingly humdrum materials has made contact with the more exotic realm of quantum gravity, as theorists realize that the spacetime continuum may itself be a phase of some deeper and still unknown constituents. These developments flesh out the sometimes vague concept of the emergence-how exactly it is that complexity begets simplicity.

Emergence in Condensed Matter and Quantum Gravity: A Nontechnical Review

1. Just a Phase They're Going Through-Landau's Theory of Phase Transitions. 2. Tipping the Scales.- 3. Quantum Physics.- 4. Frozen Yet Mobile-Superconductors, Bose-Einstein Condensates and Strange Metals.- 5. 'Twistronics'-Graphene's Magic Angle.