Nanoscience, and Superconductivity I participated in activities related to the World Year of Physics in 2005 when I served as President of the American Physical Society. We celebrated the centennial anniversary of Einstein's great accomplishments and generally promoted and celebrated physics. I would like to share a few observations about these activities and how they were related to Einstein. I'll then go on to discuss some of the history and conceptual underpinnings of condensed matter physics with examples related to research on the electronic structure of solids. Finally, I'll focus on some recent work in nanoscience and superconductivity that my colleagues and I have been doing.