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Abstract
The study of many body physics has provided a scientific playground of surprise and
continuing revolution over the past half century. The serendipitous discovery of new
states and properties of matter, phenomena such as superfluidity, the Meissner, the
Kondo and the fractional quantum hall effect, have driven the development of new conceptual
frameworks for our understanding about collective behavior, the ramifications of which
have spread far beyond the confines of terrestrial condensed matter physics- to cosmology,
nuclear and particle physics. Here I shall selectively review some of the developments
in this field, from the cold-war period, until the present day. I describe how, with
the discovery of new classes of collective order, the unfolding puzzles of high temperature
superconductivity and quantum criticality, the prospects for major conceptual discoveries
remain as bright today as they were more than half a century ago.