'A visionary, provocative, and thoughtful text: Sachdev's narrative ties his intellectual motivation to a set of striking emergent phenomena observed in experiments on well-characterized quantum materials and devices. It explores modern topics from a systematic and unified perspective based on effective field theories. The derivations give plenty of intuitive guidance to make the physical meaning of each transformation transparent for student or expert. The author covers a broad swath of the intellectual framework that underlies many of the most interesting contemporary developments in condensed matter theory.' Steven Kivelson, Stanford University