Abstract
This talk will present experimental results about a number of phenomena in pattern-forming non-equilibrium systems that have not yet been elucidated fully from a theoretical viewpoint. The issues to be addressed include critical phenomena near the bifurcation to electro-convection in nematic liquid crystals, wave-number selection in Rayleigh-Benard convection (RBC), the appearance of square patterns near onset in rotating RBC, and the scaling of correlation lengths near onset in systems with supercritical bifurcations to spatio-temporal chaos.