May 22, Tuesday -- Robert B. Laughlin, professor of physics at Stanford University, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Physics and author of "A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics From the Bottom Up," (Basic Books, 2005) will give a public lecture on new ways to think about the universe. Laughlin argues that the most familiar laws of nature, such as the solidity of objects, are collective -- their meanings emerge from the details much as the meaning of an Impressionist painting emerges as you step back from it. At very small scales, he contends, such laws disappear and cannot even be deduced from the fundamental laws that operate at tiny scales. "This observation has the troubling implication that major parts of modern physics, in particular our obsession with finding a 'theory of everything,' are ideological," Laughlin says. His talk will begin at 8 p.m. in the Sciences Lecture Hall on the UC Davis campus, and will include time for discussion.

Laughlin's lecture is sponsored by the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (ICAM), a multidisciplinary research program of the University of California headquartered at UC Davis, and the UC Davis Office of Research. The institute, which includes a worldwide network of researchers, investigates "emergent phenomena" such as weather patterns, the properties of materials or consciousness that emerge from the interactions of large numbers of smaller units. Laughlin's talk takes place during the institute's annual business meeting, May 21-22 on the UC Davis campus.