Why Physics is Cooler than You

This article from New Scientist explains why Physics rules:

Physicists have turned on the world's most powerful laser, whose pulses are more intense than any known light source in the universe... It can blast out infrared laser pulses that each have more than 1 petawatt of power. A petawatt is 1 million billion watts, far more than the output of all the world's power plants put together... A laser pulse fired at a piece of material like aluminium briefly heats it to millions of degrees Celsius and raises its pressure to about 1 billion times that at sea level on Earth...