The tradition of astronomy in Europe has been unbroken from the Neolithic and Bronze Age menhir monuments of north-western Europe to its large telescopes and space-probes. While astronomy still retains practical features, in most part it now concentrates on discovering new science. Recent advances include the discovery of previously unsuspected properties of neutrinos, confirmation of the theory of general relativity near black holes and the successful development of a coherent theory of the origin of the Universe in the Big Bang. These discoveries suggest that 19/20ths of the density of the Universe is of unknown form. There is more to do!

There is no culture that is both general throughout Europe and unique to Europe. So we cannot speak of a ‘European civilization’ in the same sense as in phrases such as ‘Chinese civilization’ or ‘Jewish civilization’ or ‘French civilization’. It is therefore prudent not to appeal to the concept of a European civilization in an attempt to justify the attempt to create a European Union or to accelerate the process of Europe-wide state-building. Nor should we feel constrained by such a concept: the future of a European Union should not be influenced by current or traditional ideas of what European civilization is, since such ideas are mistaken: it can be as protean and pluralistic as we wish to make it.

In 1999, a book appeared in Paris with the rather alarming title De la prochaine guerre avec l'Allemagne (‘On the future war with Germany’). It had not been written by some sensationalist science-fiction writer, but by none other than Philippe Delmas, a former aid to Roland Dumas, who was twice minister of Foreign Affairs under the Mitterrand administration.

We all know that Charles Darwin arrived at the great synthesis of evolution working alone in the seclusion of Down House (yet even he encountered some publication problems!) and that Albert Einstein also worked in isolation in the Patent Office in Bern. Scientists working alone can continue to make great discoveries, but in the past half century the nature of much of scientific research has undergone major changes. These changes are partly due to the tremendous expansion of the research community and institutions, which in former times consisted of a handful of individuals, but have increased in size by one or more orders of magnitude.

The importance of recent scientific discoveries concerning genetics has a perturbing effect on the legal relations governing society. There is a case for the definition of a special status concerning genetic information – an adaptation of the rules concerning medical information, a proper framework for the activity of bio-banks and a strict definition of the conditions of access to genetic information that allows for identification of a person for non-medical reasons. It would be useful to formulate some proposals of principle to initiate a discussion that must involve the scientific community.

Astronomers have built the main components of a scenario for the formation of the Solar System. Small planetary bodies accreted others by collisions within a rotating protoplanetary disk that formed at the same time as the Sun. While terrestrial planets near the warming Sun could accumulate only solid metallic and silicate material, the giant planets formed from ice and gas at lower temperatures. Each planet and satellite then followed its own specific evolution, depending upon the properties of its atmosphere and/or surface. Information about the origin and evolution of the Solar System is also provided by the comets, which can be considered as frozen fossils of the Solar System's early stages. On the borders of the outer Solar System, beyond the orbit of Neptune, the newly discovered Edgeworth–Kuiper belt is probably the reservoir where short-period comets are formed.

There have been numerous fault-lines in society in the past due to religion, race, social class and nation. Current fault-lines relate to demography: the West has a falling population whereas many countries elsewhere in the world are undergoing large population growth; net emigration has been replaced by immigration. The previous Western dominance in economic activity has also changed and the balance has moved east. These and other factors are considered as pointers to the future.

This study discusses the various short-, medium- and long-term cycle theories and focuses on the long-term Kondratiev cycle and its Schumpeterian interpretation. It gives a summary on the economic fluctuation in the 20th century and its impact on structural transformation and regional rearrangements. The problem of ‘peripheral structural crisis’ – the destruction without creation in the relatively backward regions of Europe – is introduced.

The discoveries of the first planets around a pulsar and around a star similar to our Sun have opened, after centuries of speculation, a new era in astronomy. The quest for other worlds has become reality. In this paper, the motivations for this search are presented. A comparative review is made of different techniques for their detection, with special attention paid to the planet parameters that can be derived from each method. The first discoveries and their astrophysical consequences are analysed. New questions and future projects beyond these first discoveries are reviewed, with special attention given to the search for life in extrasolar planetary systems. Finally, worldwide activities and the role of Europe are described.

This is an account of my experiences, personal and professional, of five different German regimes in the last century. I was born in Breslau in 1926 — so the first Germany I knew was the Weimar Republic — and lived under National Socialism until 1938 when I emigrated to the United States, where, by 1951, I was teaching German History. I travelled to the Federal Republic for the first time in 1950 and taught at the Free University in Berlin. I worked in the archives of the German Democratic Republic in 1961 and 1962 and participated in the first German historiographical controversy in 1964 and then lectured extensively in the fifth, unified Germany. This lecture was written and delivered at NIAS, Wassenaar, the Netherlands, in 1998 and it reflects on, and exemplifies, the relation between private memory and public history. The German past, in all its great and catastrophic complexity, is still present in German political and intellectual life and hence the work of the historian has a potential political and pedagogical impact. My basic approach to German history emerges in this essay, as it does even more pointedly in the lectures I give in Germany itself.

Becoming a native listener is the necessary precursor to becoming a native speaker. Babies in the first year of life undertake a remarkable amount of work; by the time they begin to speak, they have perceptually mastered the phonological repertoire and phoneme co-occurrence probabilities of the native language, and they can locate familiar word-forms in novel continuous-speech contexts. The skills acquired at this early stage form a necessary part of adult listening. However, the same native listening skills also underlie problems in listening to a late-acquired non-native language, accounting for why in such a case listening (an innate ability) is sometimes paradoxically more difficult than, for instance, reading (a learned ability).

The purpose of this study was to examine and explain how the landscape of personal relationships is changing through new means of technologies such as the Internet. Nowadays, increasing numbers of individuals are getting to know each other, and falling in love, thanks to this form of communication. In order to understand and analyse this phenomenon from a sociological perspective, I have carried out exploratory research on the situation in Italy. We conducted a series of interviews and constructed the histories of the lives of Italians who, by navigating, fell in love with their correspondents and got involved in affairs with, more or less, happy endings. We were thus able to discover that, behind this virtual world, there are real feelings, emotions, hopes and dreams. Often, on the computer, anonymity and the barrier of the screen allow people to be more spontaneous, sincere, true and genuine with each other than they might be in real life. True love affairs according to Francesco Alberoni's definition are born. However, meeting in person, which must happen sooner or later, can result in losing what might have been gained up to that point. As in every challenge, many end up as losers and few as winners.

Social and cultural changes that have taken place since the 1960s have had a major impact, in particular on the lives of young adults, but they have also affected the living conditions and opportunities of older adults. The presentation of a selection of relevant data about elderly people's demographic position in different countries of Europe is central in the second section. In the final section results of a Dutch survey are provided and information about new flexible forms of living arrangements when starting a new partner relationship after the age of fifty, are presented and discussed

For 200 years, black holes have been a solution looking for a problem. In the last two decades they have moved to become a real scientific phenomenon. Black holes exist both as stars in our own Galaxy (identifiable as members of binary stars that emit X-rays) and as the centres of energetic galaxies (‘active galactic nuclei’). The last decade has seen the first accurate mass measurements of these black holes, which lie in the range from five times the mass of our own Sun to many million times. We also have clear evidence for the way that black holes accrete material as their primary energy source. Furthermore, the presence of super-massive black holes has been established in some nearby galaxies, and in the centre of our own Galaxy, from their gravitational effect on nearby stars. Some observations show processes that occur very close to the black hole, where the field of gravity is strong enough to test General Relativity. Recent observations suggest the existence of intermediate mass black holes of an as yet unknown origin.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) had considerable influence on the ‘modern’ world but did not consider himself part of it. His search for a way of thinking, to give a deeper understanding than the science of his day, has considerable analogies with that of Goethe. He was less sanguine than Goethe about the possibility of a renewal of culture in his own day but his philosophical work, in its stress on restraint and concreteness, is permeated by the ethical ideals that he attempted to realize in his life and that of his friends. He also shows some kinship with Goethe's non-theistic mysticism. His philosophical work is a guide that, perhaps rightly, requires readers to find the answer for themselves.

Man inhabits two realms, that of reality and that of the imagination. The progress of science is a complex negotiation between these two realms, a dialectic in which fact-oriented observations and probability-oriented imagination are inseparably intertwined. But there are many signs that, recently, the natural equilibrium between these two has become destabilized and artifice and imagination have gained the upper hand to a distinctly unhealthy extent. In both science and scholarship we seem to be involved in an increasing and deeply problematic shift from pre-occupation with virtual rather than actual reality.

This paper considers the forms of life of old age and the opportunities presented by these forms of life (i.e. optimal ageing) as well as corresponding research programmes into gerontology. Ageing and old age are usually viewed more as a biological, medical and socio-economic problem and less as a form of life that can be optimized and cultivated. Viewed from this perspective, the gerontological research programme is the programme of interventionist science. This, of course, includes natural scientific research, which today is organized along very specialized disciplinary lines. The point to grasp is that the gerontological research programme is an integrative programme, and thus something pursued in an interdisciplinary, even transdisciplinary, manner. This possibility is supported by the fact that there is apparently no uniform genetic programme that could explain the ageing process and prevent differential ageing. In the introductory part of the paper, a differentiated culture of ageing is discussed, followed by a descriptive part, in which various research programmes are presented. The conclusion takes up some ideas on the interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity of a future science of ageing.

The war-generation dealt with the Holocaust as a part of the spectrum of crimes inflicted by the Hitler regime on humanity. The postwar generation, which bore no responsibility, even as neutral witnesses or accomplices, saw it as a special monstrosity; Auschwitz has been integrated into their cultural heritage. In education this means that an obligation of remembrance can provoke reactions of boredom, irritation or worse, since youth is confronted daily with other problems. But remembrance should not be marginal in school history.

The 20th century saw the establishment of the first quantitative theory seeking to describe the behaviour of the Universe as a whole – the Big Bang. This sets up a framework within which there has been great success in interpreting a wide range of observations, including the abundances of light chemical elements, the existence and spectrum of the cosmic microwave radiation, and the formation and evolution of galaxies. At the end of the 20th century, the surprising conclusion of the Big Bang theory is that 95% of the Universe is made of two different unknown types of material whose nature remains unclear: dark matter and dark energy. Needless to say, this is a major challenge for science. At the beginning of the 21st century, cosmology appears poised to enter a high-precision era, where the key quantities of cosmology will be determined to two or more significant figures. If cosmologists are on the right track, this will confirm the existence of dark matter and dark energy; if not, it will force us to revise our current picture of the Universe. Either way, the prospect is for exciting years ahead in cosmology.

The surprising fact about the 20th century was the return of the liberal free market, circling back to where it began. It was helped because liberalism, unlike socialism, was never a theory of history and could not be falsified by events. But, socialist historians still control the past, and it is still widely believed that the welfare state was created by socialism and that genocide is right-wing. In fact, socialist leaders, fearful of preserving capitalism, opposed the welfare state, which in Britain was the creation of Asquith. Between the wars, Labour had no national health plans, and it was the last of the British parties to accept the Beveridge report. Repetition and suppression have entrenched the myth, which is widely accepted, that welfare equals socialism. The first history of socialism, by a French radical, Alfred Sudre, was opposed to socialism as a conservative idea; Marx and Engels, Ruskin and Morris were openly conservative and the Bolsheviks proudly elitist.