Lecture Notes in Physics 1969–1985

In 1979 when the series celebrated its tenth anniversary I wrote: Ten years ago the series LECTURE NOTES IN PHYSICS was founded with two goals in mind: Firstly, very good lectures, especially those devoted to themes of actual research, should become accessible to a wider audience, and secondly, proceedings of conferences should appear quickly and at a lower price. In both cases, however, preference was given to genuine “Lecture Notes”, i.e., contrary to concise articles in scientific journals written for the expert, the contributions to this series should present many different aspects of the problem in question and should be intelligible for a wider audience quite often including students or workers from other fields of research. At the same time “Lecture Notes” also means that the form of a text might be tentative and less accurate than usually required for a textbook or a monograph. However, although tentative in form, a high scientific standard in correctness and in selection of the material presented is asked for. Thanks to the generous help of Springer-Verlag, to the efforts of organizers of conferences, and last, but not least, to the splendid cooperation of the authors, these goals have been reached in a satisfactory way. Very rarely does a research paper in physics outlive a period of about three years, and therefore it is very gratifying to observe that some of the volumes of our series are still highly esteemed after a much longer lapse of time. As for the second goal, quite a few of the proceedings in this series appeared within weeks after the meeting in question. Due to a steadily increasing number of good manuscripts submitted it should be possible for the benefit of their readers to raise the standards further and to open this series to more areas of research in physics and its applications.