The past decade has seen the development of the operational understanding of fun- damental interactions within the standard model. This has detoured our attention from the great enigmas posed by the dynamics and collective behavior of strongly interacting particles. Discovered more than 30 years ago, the thermal nature of the hadronic particle spectra has stimulated considerable theoretical effort, which so far has failed to 'confirm' on the basis of microscopic interactions the origins of this phenomenon. However, a highly successful Statistical Bootstrap Model was developed by Rolf Hagedorn...

Seven years after the first experiments in the new field of Nuclear Physics, the Highly Relativistic Heavy Ion Physics, the Nato-Advanced- Study-Institute on the 'Particle Production in Highly Excited Matter' was held from July 12 till July 24, 1992, at Il Ciocco, Castelvecchio Pascoli, near Lucca in Italy. The school took place at a mo- ment when intensive efforts are mounted by the scientific community of Relativistic Heavy Ion Physics to meet the extraordinary challenge of the new upcoming physics opportunities. The gold beams of 10 GeV A at Brookhaven AGS have been sent to the experiments...