Excerpt

It is usually said that ours is an age of specialization, and that is true. But there is a striking phenomenon of convergence in science and scholarship that has been taking place, especially in the forty years since the Second World War, and at an accelerated pace during the last decade. New subjects, highly interdisciplinary in traditional terms, are emerging and represent, in many cases, the frontier of research. These interdisciplinary subjects do not link together the whole of one traditional discipline with another; particular subfields are joined together to make a new subject. The pattern is a varied one and constantly changing.

In order to discuss a few examples of diverse character, I shall start from subjects close to my own and then move further away. I hope you will forgive me for talking about matters far from my area of expertise, and will correct whatever howlers I make in the course of doing so. Also, I apologize for mentioning in this introduction, for lack of time and space, only some of the emerging syntheses about which we shall hear and only some of the distinguished speakers who will discuss them.

Elementary particle physics and the cosmology of the early universe are the twin pillars on which all the laws of natural science are, in principle, based. These two fundamental subjects have practically merged in the last few years, especially on the theoretical side. In the earliest fraction of a second in the history of the universe, if we look at time running backwards, we go from an easily comprehensible quark soup (a few moments after the beginning) to an earlier era in which the conditions are so extreme that, if we could observe them, they would test our speculative ideas about unifying all the physical forces including gravitation. I should mention that in the last few weeks these ideas of unification have become much more specific. The hope, the very bold speculation, that we might actually find a general theory of all the elementary particles and forces of Nature is encouraged by recent developments in superstring theory.

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