Summary

Extract

This conference has been marked by our willingness to entertain grand schemes of synthesis of theoretical ideas and the observational evidence on how galaxies and large-scale structure might have formed. At IAU Symposium 104 on this subject held in Crete just 5 years ago there was little discussion of how all the pieces of the puzzle might fit together. Now we have at least three candidate grand syntheses that have been worked out in some detail and have been discussed here: scale-invariant cold dark matter, by Frenk; massive cosmic strings, by Turok; and exploding magnetized superconducting cosmic strings, by Ostriker. I have accordingly placed each of the topics I want to review under the heading of the grand scheme for which it seems most embarrassing. This negative approach is a little unfair, but I think we can take it as given that we would not be considering a scheme that did not have many good points, and that the real interest is the probing of weak points by which we hope to learn which schemes might be strengthened, which might safely be abandoned.