At the time that the editors conceived the idea of trying to organize the meeting on which the contents of this volume are based and which became, in March 1980, a NATO Advanced Study Institute, the techniques of time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy, in both the nanosecond and sub-nanosecond time-domains, might reasonably have been said to be coming of age, both in their execution and in the analysis and interpretation of the results obtained. These techniques, then as now, comprised mainly a number of pulse methods using laser, flash-lamp or, most recently, synchrotron radiation. In...