Phil Attard researches broadly in statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, and colloid science. He has held academic positions in Australia, Europe, and North America, and he was a Professorial Research Fellow of the Australian Research Council. He has authored some 120 papers, 10 review articles, and 4 books, with over 7000 citations. As an internationally recognized researcher, he has made seminal contributions to the theory of electrolytes and the electric double layer, to measurement techniques for atomic force microscopy and colloid particle interactions, and to computer simulation and integral equation algorithms for condensed matter. Attard is perhaps best known for his discovery of nanobubbles and for establishing their nature. Recent research has focused on non-equilibrium systems. He has discovered a new entropy --the second entropy-- as the basis for non-equilibrium thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, and chemical kinetics, and he has derived the probability distribution for non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. The theory provides a coherent approach to non-equilibrium systems and to irreversible processes, and it has led to the development of stochastic molecular dynamics and non-equilibrium Monte Carlo computer simulation algorithms. Attard has formulated quantum statistical mechanics in classical phase space, for its conceptual insight into quantum mechanics, for its account of the transition to our classical world, and for its potential for efficient computational approaches to many-body condensed matter systems. Also, it is different, which is where discovery is to be found.