ELI’s lasers enable a broad range of discovery possibilities from the most theoretical and exotic disciplines to very practical material and engineering problems. Techniques being deployed at ELI decrease the pulse duration to the attosecond-zeptosecond time scale. In this way, exawatt power can be reached with a simple joule of energy. As the technology develops and spreads, it becomes one of the more cost-effective means to conduct ‘big science’ in physics, biology and materials science.