From the apple to the levitated superconductor, the amazing thing about nature is that the principles we learn in the lab teach us about the cosmos and vice versa. This is a principle that is as alive today as it was in Newton's time - and it provides a very powerful motivation for our modern research: a capacity for making a paradigm shift by understanding the paradoxes we uncover in the laboratory.
The challenges facing us today, epitomized by our failure to quantize gravity, the mysteries of dark matter, energy and quantum information, challenge physics to its core. I will discuss some less well-known “dark matter challenges of the solid state”, epitomized by the discovery of strange states of matter: strange metals with linear resistivity, strange insulators which appear to exhibit neutral Fermi surfaces and strange superconductors with extraordinary resistance to magnetic fields. I will argue that laboratory-scale problems of this ilk challenge our fundamental understanding of matter in new and intriguing ways.