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 The lecture was titled “More is Different” and was given by Dr Chris Hooley from the University of St Andrews.
The main principal was that you cannot look at one individual atom and expect it to behave in the same way as it does on its own when it is with millions of other atoms of the same type. The atoms behave very differently because of the different conditions they impose on each other, and what they are made up of. Although looking inside the nucleus, and incredibly inside quarks, and observing their behaviour might develop our understanding of the matter, it does not help our understanding of large-scale systems: systems we find in every day life, such as traffic jams, the universe or even the way the brain works.
 Dr Hooley used a variety of experiments to show examples of these interactions, such as temperature sensitive plastic that changes colour depending on the temperature. The talk was very interesting and there was a lot to be learned from it.
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