This volume contains a series of lectures presented at the Centro de Estudios Cientificos de Santiago to celebrate John Archibald Wheeler's invention of the term "black hole" a quarter of a century ago. In 11 lucid articles, a distinguished group of world experts discuss current issues in black hole physics, ranging from epistemological considerations to recent developments connecting black hole thermodynamics and string theory.

This collection of papers explore developments and advances in the field of astrophysics.

This article is dedicated to Claudio Bunster on the occasion of his 60th birthday. It is a great honor to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to him, who in my opinion has been the greatest national physicist ever, for his wise guidance and intrepid support through the years. As a Chilean, I can further tell that Claudio s contributions have been well far beyond theoretical physics, helping our country to be ready to face future challenges through science. Gravity in diverse dimensions is a subject in which Claudio has done major c- tributions, encouraging in many ways the following...

This volume is based on a meeting on Quantum Mechanics of Fundamental Systems, held December 17-20 of 1987, at the Centro de Estudios Cientificos de Santiago (CECS). The meeting was intended to review new developments in the field defined by its purposely vague title. We were especially interested in communicating important advances in a broad perspective and in a self-contained manner to a wide colleague ship, and in particular to Latin American physicists. Whatever success we may have achieved in that direction would cer tainly not have been possible without the help and generosity of many...

From January 8-13,1990, distinguished physicists from many nations came to Chile to share with each other and with Latin American students exciting recent developments. The occasion was the third of a series of meetings on Quantum Mechanics of Fundamental Systems which are held every two years at the Centro de Estudios Cientificos de Santiago. This volume grew out from that gathering. The meeting was possible thanks to the generous support of the Tinker Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, the Ministere des AfIaires...

This book grew out of a set of lecture notes on gravitational Chern-Simons (CS) theories developed over the past decade for several schools and different audiences including graduate students and researchers.CS theories are gauge-invariant theories that can include gravity consistently. They are only defined in odd dimensions and represent a very special class of theories in the Lovelock family. Lovelock gravitation theories are the natural extensions of General Relativity for dimensions greater than four that yield second-order field equations for the metric. These theories also admit local...