Are all laws of physics fundamental and ultimately, one hopes, amenable to the reductionist approach that has given us the standard model of particles for example? Or, are some laws effective and describing "only" the physical world as a result of the limited energy scale, length scale and time scale that they are tested? The fact that one often "rediscovers" an already existing mathematical theory or framework entirely different than the one for which it was first constructed does not help dispel the latter impression. In this talk, I will discuss the problem of spin ice, from its discovery to the current search for quantum spin ice materials and show how these systems illustrate the concept of emergence; explicitly, the emergence of quantum electrodynamics (QED).
