Astrophysical probes of fundamental physics

I review the motivation for varying fundamental couplings and discuss how these measurements can be used to constrain fundamental physics scenarios that would otherwise be inaccessible to experiment. I highlight the current controversial evidence for varying couplings and present some new results. Finally I focus on the relation between varying couplings and dark energy, and explain how varying coupling measurements might be used to probe the nature of dark energy, with some advantages over standard methods. In particular I discuss what can be achieved with future spectrographs such as ESPRESSO and CODEX.