This symposium was organized at the B.M. Birla Science Centre, Hyderabad, India, and provided a platform for frontier physicists to exchange ideas and review the latest work and developments on a variety of interrelated topics. A feature of the symposium, as well as the proceedings, is the B.M. Birla Memorial Lecture by Nobel Laureate Professor Gerard 't Hooft. There were participants from the USA, several European countries, Russia and CIS countries, South Africa, Japan, India and elsewhere, of whom some forty scientists presented papers. Spanning a wide range of contemporary issues in...

"If there would be no God then what a staff-captain am I?" said one of the characters in a novel by Dostoevskii. In a similar way we can exclaim: "If there would be no nonlinearity than what physics would that be'?." Really, the most interesting and exciting effects are described by non linear equations, and vanish in the linear approximation. For example, the general theory of relativity by A.Einstein comes to mind first - one of the most beautiful physical theories, which is in fact essentially nonlinear. Next, the phase transitions crystal liquid and liquid gas are due to the anhar...

"If there would be no God then what a staff-captain am I?" said one of the characters in a novel by Dostoevskii. In a similar way we can exclaim: "If there would be no nonlinearity than what physics would that be'?." Really, the most interesting and exciting effects are described by non linear equations, and vanish in the linear approximation. For example, the general theory of relativity by A.Einstein comes to mind first - one of the most beautiful physical theories, which is in fact essentially nonlinear. Next, the phase transitions crystal liquid and liquid gas are due to the anhar...