Trends in Physics EPS-7: Proceedings of the Seventh General Conference of the European Physical Society

The Seventh General Conference of the European Physical Society "Trends in Physics" was held in Finland, August 10–14, 1987. The conference sites were the Finlandia Hall in Helsinki and the Helsinki University of Technology in Espoo. Seventy-five plenary and invited talks were presented together with about hundred and forty posters. In this special issue we have been able to include the majority of the plenary and invited talks. They cover a large area of contemporary physics from cosmology to biophysics. In addition a section has been devoted to the role of physics in our human society. In our compilation of the papers we have not attempted to follow the organisation of the conference, but the contributions are arranged so that the readers can find their way through the material in as easy a way as we have been able to achieve. We are very grateful to the authors for their contributions to these Proceedings, which in many ways reflect the exciting progress physics has made during recent years. It is, of course, impossible to cover all aspects of the development of physics in a five days conference. Nevertheless after having had access to all the manuscripts we feel that the international programme committee did an excellent job. This successful result was achieved largely through the efforts of the Program Committee Chairman, Professor Klaus Dransfeld. We think that it is a remarkable achievement of the European Physical Society to run these general physics conferences, where physicists representing widely diverse fields can meet and discover that they still share a common language.