18 - Conference summary

Summary

Dear colleagues and friends, Having to summarize this meeting with its many contributions to a great variety of topics is a questionable honour. Looking through my notes I realize all too well that my wish to understand details and at the same time not to get lost in them, is larger than my ability to do so. I shall nevertheless try and give you a kind of overview of our field as it came to light-or remained in partial darkness-during this meeting.

The development of general relativity and, more generally, the physics of gravitation as it was and is reflected in the GR-meetings, starting with the Bern conference in 1955 as recalled by Engelbert Schucking in his splendid talk Thursday night, has some similarity with that of the universe, or at least with the standard model of it: a rather smooth, uniform beginning, then the evolution of more and more structure, and now a field that looks rather inhomogeneous, expanding here, contracting there, transparant in some regions, opaque (to me) in others, and partly chaotic. Important aspects of the present state are the interconnections of general relativity with gauge theories, particle physics and astrophysics. The most conspicuous and important feature of this evolution, however, is that experimental and observational research on the properties of gravity on the laboratory, terrestrial, solar system, galactic and cosmological scale has grown considerably from very small beginnings and occupies now a sizeable part of the plenary talks and, in particular, of the workshops.