Summary of the Colloquium

Extract

I have rarely had the pleasure of attending a conference in which the sheer volume of information has been so impressive and the contributions have been so diversified. Ordinarily, an I.A.U. colloquium is quite specialized, but this one might easily have been sponsored by half a dozen commissions and several international scientific unions. Astronomers from many sub-disciplines, atomic physicists, plasma physicists, aerodynamicists and applied mathematicians have come together to unite solar and stellar physics and to learn one another's scientific language. In principle, my task is to summarize more than 100 papers, which is clearly impossible even if I had had two evenings to prepare instead of one. The best I can do is to mention a few of the papers which seem to me to have conveyed the flavor of the conference and to ask the forgiveness of the remaining authors.