Already in 1997, the topics included in this meeting had been enlarged to include all different phases and phase transitions relevant on laboratory scales or in cosmology. The '98 meeting followed this trend, and there was a balanced combination of the physics associated with both strong and electroweak interactions (and beyond). The main motivation continues to be the understanding of the standard model in “extreme” situations, particularly relevant on the cosmological scale. Most contributions were in one way or another concerned with the finite-temperature aspects of strong and electroweak interactions, and, as in the previous meeting, one persistent theme was the present understanding of baryon-number asymmetry: how it can be created, and how it can be maintained beyond the earliest stages of the Universe. The recent progress in describing the real-time and nonequilibrium dynamics of the non-Abelian gauge was covered in a number of the main talks, as well as in several shorter contributions and posters. The conference presented examples of impressive analytical progress and equally impressive results from numerical simulations: the two techniques continue to fruitfully complement each other. One completely new theme at this conference was the recent suggestion that finite-density QCD may contain new and interesting condensed phases in the neighborhood of the conventional critical density separating quark matter from hadronic matter. All of these developments, and many more, are reflected in this book.
