Maurice Levy

S. Deser

The theory of General Relativity, after its invention by Albert Einstein, remained for many years a monument of mathemati cal speculation, striking in its ambition and its formal beauty, but quite separated from the main stream of modern Physics, which had centered, after the early twenties, on quantum mechanics and its applications. In the last ten or fifteen years, however, the situation has changed radically. First, a great deal of significant exper~en tal data became available. Then important contributions were made to the incorporation of general relativity into the framework of quantum theory. Finally, in the last three years, exciting devel opments took place which have placed general relativity, and all the concepts behind it, at the center of our understanding of par ticle physics and quantum field theory. Firstly, this is due to the fact that general relativity is really the "original non-abe lian gauge theory," and that our description of quantum field in teractions makes extensive use of the concept of gauge invariance. Secondly, the ideas of supersymmetry have enabled theoreticians to combine gravity with other elementary particle interactions, and to construct what is perhaps the first approach to a more finite quantum theory of gravitation, which is known as super gravity.

Cargèse 1978

Recent Developments in Gravitation

B. Jancovici

Vol. 1, Statistical Mechanics

Cargese Lecture Notes, 1964

The 1987 Cargese Summer Institute on Partiele Physies was organized by the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris (M. LEVY and J.-L. BASDEVANT), CERN (M. JACOB), the Universite Catholique de Louvain (D. SPEISER and J. WEYERS), and the Katholieke Universiteit te Leuven (R. GASTHANS), whieh, sinee 1975, have joined their efforts and worked in eommon. It was the 25th summer institute held at Cargese and the ninth one organized by the two institutes of theoretieal physics at Leuven and Louvain-la-Neuve. The 1987 school was centered around two main themes: the re cent developments in string theory and the physics of high energy colliders. As the standard model of the fundamental interaetions has repeatedly proved to be suecessful in explaining the experimental findings in par tiele physies, more attention was given in this school to possible new features arising from string inspired models. This led us to inelude in the program aseries of lectures devoted to string theory per se. They eovered the more mathematical aspects of the theory as weIl as the phenomenological implications. The second theme concerns high energy collider physics and was meant to prepare young physicists for the future experimental results to be expected from the pp and e+e- colliders. It brought theorists and ex perimentalists actively together in their search for a better understand ing of the high energy phenomena.

Maurice Levy

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