The method of effective field theory (EFT) is ideally suited to deal with physical systems containing separate energy scales. Applied to low energy hadronic phenomena it provides a framework for systematically describing nuclear systems in a way consistent with quantum chromodynamics, the underlying theory of strong interactions. Because EFT offers the possibility of a unified description of all low energy processes involving nucleons, it has the potential to become the foundation of conventional nuclear physics.

Much progress has been made recently in this field: a number of observables in...