Colloquium

Cold atomic gases in optical lattices are emerging as excellent laboratories for testing models of strongly interacting particles in
condensed matter physics. It is possible to tune the interactions,
dimensionality, spin, statistics and a host of other variables in a
completely disorder free environment. This has opened up unique possibilities of mapping out phase diagrams of quantum models and
observing quantum phase transitions for the very first time. I will
discuss some of the challenges in this field.

Ideas about information are pervasive, yet the fundamental nature and structure of information - if indeed it has one! - remains elusive. Work done from many different perspectives, including those of physics, biology, logic, computer science, statistics, and game and decision theory, has yielded insights into various aspects of information. Could there be a comprehensive, unified theory?

It is usually assumed that the quantum wave-particle duality can have no counterpart in classical physics. We were driven into revisiting this question when we found that a droplet bouncing on a vibrated bath could couple to the surface wave it excites. It thus becomes a self-propelled "walker", a symbiotic object formed by the droplet and its associated wave.

String theory, famously, has a great many ground states. So many, in fact, that some argue that we should seek information in the statistical properties of these vacua, or worse, argue that we should abandon string theory as a theory with predictive power. On the other hand, very few vacua are known that look like the observed world of particle physics. In this talk I will review this situation and show that there are realistic models at the tip of the distribution of vacua, where topological complexity is minimised.