 I'd like you to introduce Jacob Ross from the ANU College of Science, and the title of Jacob's three-minute thesis tonight is Building the Lego Verse. Do you remember playing with Lego and feeling limitless possibilities at your fingertips? You could build cities, spaceships, even dinosaurs. The only limit was your imagination. All of the wonder of Lego comes from one simple rule. Top brick goes on bottom brick. Our universe is built from tiny Lego bricks, atoms. The laws of atomic physics are more complicated than Lego, but the idea is the same. Many simple things work together to build the intricate wonder of stars, oceans, and life. But imagine trying to rebuild the Lego Land theme park in Denmark without an instruction manual. Despite the simple law of Lego, when you play with lots of bricks, things get complicated. Physicists call this the many-body problem. There are so many variables, and neither mathematicians nor supercomputers know what to do. This is the heart of a beautiful question. How does nature's complexity emerge from simple pieces? Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman said that what I cannot create, I do not understand. So to understand the universe, I'm building the Lego Verse. But any good universe starts with nothing. So I built a vacuum chamber, emptier than interplanetary space for my empty Lego board. But my brother might come and kick over my stuff. This is just like environmental interference, my lab. So I use lasers and magnetic fields to hold my atoms, suspended by light in nothingness. Or if mum comes and trips over my crate of bricks, they'll get all mixed up. This is just like random thermal motion. So I use laser cooling to chill my atoms to absolute zero. To understand how complexity emerges from simplicity, I use laser light to constrain how many atoms can fit together and then let them assemble themselves. And using detectors sensitive to single atoms, I observe the structures that they've built spontaneously and decipher a page in the universal instruction manual of atomic Lego. Soon I will finish building a quantum simulator which will hold a miniature universe. This is a new way to solve problems, some of which we may not have yet imagined. By solving the many body problem, we are becoming master builders, creating the next generation of information, energy, and medical technologies brick by brick, atom by atom.