An excursion through the nuclear many-body landscape

We emphasize the point that every time that increased technical possibilities have become possible, on the level of accelerators, the use of exotic beams as well as on the data taking and analyses, new physics has never ceased to show up. I will illustrate this theme with a number of examples that have, over the last decades, expanded our horizon in observering and exploring the nuclear many-body system (such as superdeformation, ultra-high precision gamma- spectroscopy, mass measurements, halo physics, exploration of superheavy elements....) in various directions. I will also discuss recent developments in nuclear theory where various subfields like ab-initio methods, mean-field techniques, nuclear shell-model calculations, collective geometrical (shape) approaches and symmetry-guided and group-theoretical methods all tend to have more in common and can give rise to quite new fields of research.