A fundamental step towards gaining a deeper understanding of our world is to increase the resolution of the investigative instruments we use; i.e. to increase the energy, and hence to decrease the wavelength, of the particles which constitute our probes. Almost any substantial progress in our understanding of the fundamental laws of Nature has been obtained when a new generation of accelerators has allowed us to achieve a new energy range. The new results have generated new questions, thus encouraging us to construct new machines to reach even higher energy levels. The relative energy gain...

As we enter the nineties, there is worldwide awareness that the future of all mankind is inexorably linked by the world we share, and its response to man's activities. Lasers and the optical sciences have brought powerful tools to measure and understand our environment. LIDAR (laser radar) and laser fluorescence allow us to measure atmospheric and oceanic pollutants, as well as industrial emissions, from many kilometers distance. And a variety of sensitive laser-based spectroscopic techniques permit the accurate analysis of heavy metals and other trace elements in the environment. In...

This Seminar has been organized in Erice, in the frame of the Eloisatron project activities, with the special purpose of bringing together an interdisciplinary group of distinguished physicists with prominent interest in the development of the accelerators. Listening to the invited lectures, examining the new topics and reviewing ideas for the acceleration of particles to energies beyond those attainable in machines whose construction is under way or is now contemplated are all important moments of this Seminar that will offer to the Italian Physicists a very important opening over the...

This volume records the proceedings at the Sixth School of Thoracic Medicine held at the Ettore Majorana School of International Scientific Culture in June 1982. Foregathered there were a heterogeneous group comprising clinicians, pharmacologists, pathologists, ultra- microscopists, biochemists and immunologists and they presented the eighteen papers seen in the contents list. The discussion which followed each paper was faithfully recorded (and where necessary translated) and may be found after each author's presentation. This free discussion is perhaps the most valuable part of the School...

This volume documents the proceedings of a symposium on "The Pulmonary Circulation" held at the Ettore Majorana Center for Scientific Culture, in Erice, Sicily, between 16th July and 21st July 1979. This was attended by about 200 participants drawn from Europe as a whole, but the majority were from Southern Europe. The discussion was recorded either in English or Italian and the tapes were reduced to a verbatim typescript by the Ente Nazionale Interpeti Congresso. The verbatim typescript has been edited using a few guiding principles as foliows: Titles and honorifics have been eliminated...

Twenty years ago, researchers wishing to identify contaminated areas in aquatic environments generally took water samples, and analysed them badly (as we have since discovered) for a few "pollutants" which were of topical note at the time (and which could be quantified by the methods then available). Today, the use of aquatic organisms as biomonitors in preference to water analysis has become commonplace, and many national and interna tional programmes exist around the world involving such studies. We believe that this trend will continue, and have complete faith in the methodology (when it...

The conference "Laser Science and Technology" was held May 11-19, 1987 in Erice, Sicily. This was the 12th conference organized by the Internatio- nal School of Quantum Electronics, under the auspices of the "Ettore Majorana" Center for Scientific Culture. This volume contains both the in- vited and contributed papers presented at the conference, covering current research work in two areas: new laser sources, and laser applications. The operation of the first laser by Dr. Theodore Maiman in 1960 initia- ted a decade of scientific exploration of new laser sources. This was fol- lowed by the...

The present volume is based on the proceedings of the 9th INFN ELOISATRON Project workshop held at the Ettore Majorana Centre for Scien- tific Culture, Erice-Trapani, Italy, in the period July 15-26, 1989. The topic of this workshop was: Higgs Particles - Physics Issues and Experimental Searches in High Energy Collisions and it was attended by over forty participants. The concept of Higgs mechanism, like most other scientific ideas, evolved over several years, with many independent and important contribu- tions in the sixtees to which Peter Higgs has referred in his historical account in...

The International School of Fusion Reactor Technology started its courses 15 years ago and since then has mantained a biennial pace. Generally, each course has developed the subject which was announced in advance at the closing of the previous course. The subject to which the present proceedings refer was chosen in violation of that rule so as to satisfy the recent and diffuse interest in cold fusion among the main European laboratories involved in controlled thermonuclear research (CTR). In the second half of 1986 we started to prepare a workshop aimed at assessing the state of the art and...