THE EDITORS: DAVID L. BLOCK AND KENNETH C. FREEMAN (SOC CO-CHAIRS), IVANIO PUERARI, ROBERT GROESS AND LIZ K. BLOCK 1. Harvard College Observatory, 1958 The past century has truly brought about an explosive period of growth and discovery for the physical sciences as a whole, and for astronomy in particular. Galaxy morphology has reached a renaissance . . The year: 1958. The date: October 1. The venue: Harvard College Observatory. The lecturer: Walter Baade. With amazing foresight, Baade penned these words: "Young stars, supergiants and so on, make a terrific splash - lots of light. The total mass of these can be very small compared to the total mass of the system". Dr Layzer then asked the key question: " . . . the discussion raises the point of what this classification would look like if you were to ignore completely all the Population I, and just focus attention on the Population II . . . " We stand on the shoulders of giants. The great observer E. E. Barnard, in his pioneering efforts to photograph the Milky Way, devoted the major part of his life to identifying and numbering dusty "holes" and dust lanes in our Milky Way. No one could have dreamt that the pervasiveness of these cosmic dust masks (not only in our Galaxy but also in galaxies at high redshift) is so great, that their "penetration" is truly one of the pioneering challenges from both space-borne telescopes and from the ground.

When I wasa child, growing up in South America,I often went camping in the wild and hence had direct access to the wondrous Southern sky; the Southern Cross was all mine at the time. Little did I know then that the study of the sky would take such a huge importance in my life, and that in the end astronomy and astrophysics would in many ways become my country and my religion. I have lived in several di?erent countries, and when asked my nationality, I am always very tempted to reply: astronomer. I started as a theorist, and my only dream in my youth was to spend nights thinking and calculating, with paper and pencil, and to have the impression by dawn that I had understood something new. So at the time astronomy was seen or dreamt by me as a solitary endeavour, with periodic encounters with my wise adviser and professors; it is this model that I adopted when doing my PhD work. My generation has lived through many revolutions of all kinds. Those in astronomy, I believe, remain particularly remarkable, and I am a true product of them. Now, I elect to live and work in large organizations, and to share my endeavours with many people. And I relish the series of Andr ́ e Heck on Organizations and Strategies in Astronomy, which help us recover our memories, reconstitute our own story, and read with glee about our neighbouring or far-away colleagues.

This volume, the proceedings of the 16th Florida Workshop in Nonlinear Astronomy and Physics, emphasizes the cross-disciplinary nature of much current research in astronomy and physics in the area of dynamics. Developments in one field can advance more quickly when there is information available regarding parallel developments in other fields.

Heidelberg, Germany, 4-8 October 2004

"These are the proceedings of the international conference "Formation and Evolution of Galaxy Disks" organized by the Specola Vaticana (the Vatican Observatory). The meeting hosted 198 participants from 26 countries. The program consisted of 61 talks and about 130 poster papers. In 2000 the Vatican Observatory organized a conference on Galaxy Disks and Disk Galaxies, the proceedings of which were published in ASP Conference Series Vol. 230. Since that time, a great amount of work has been done in this very active field. October 2007 was deemed an appropriate time to hold another similar conference where outstanding senior and junior astronomers in this field could air new results. The conference was focused on the formation and evolution of galaxy disks and covered the following topics: (1) properties of nearby galaxy disks; (2) interstellar medium, star formation, and chemical evolution; (3) disk edges, outskirts, and environment; (4) accretion onto disks, interactions, and mergers; (5) secular evolution of disks and bar/spiral driven evolution of galaxies; (6) evolution of disk structural properties; and (7) disk formation in a hierarchical universe. This books is of interest for researchers in extragalactic astronomy. It presents an overview of the relevant results and the progress made in the field in the last seven years."--Publisher's website

The workshop was about the developments of the thermodynamical and dynamical behavior of many-body systems in which the interactions decay very slowly with the distance: they present very strange properties, not found in the other systems. The possibility of testing the theoretical ideas in laboratory systems was the most innovative issue.