L. Kramer – författare

The Yearbook of European Environmental Law brings together topical analyses of contemporary European Environmental Law. Leading European and American academics provide in-depth scholarly articles covering a wide range of challenging issues. The Yearbook contains an easily accessible Annual Survey providing legal practitioners, academics, and policy-makers with detailed and indispensable information on current and future European environmental law. In addition the Yearbook features summaries and full texts of preparatory commission documents, green books, and other discussion papers, as well as a selection of reviews of books.

In the last 20 years the study of nonlinear nonequilibrium phenomena in spa­ tially extended systems, with particular emphasis on pattern-forming phenomena, has been one of the very active areas in physics, exhibiting interesting ramifi­ cations into other sciences. During this time the study of the "classic" systems, like Rayleigh-Benard convection and Taylor vortex flow in simple fluids, has also been supplemented by the study of more complex systems. Here liquid crystals have played, and are still playing, a major role. One might say that liquid crystals provide just the right amount and right kind of complexity. They are full of non­ linearities and give rise to new symmetry classes, which are sometimes actually simpler to deal with qualitatively, but they still allow a quantitative description of experiments in many cases. In fact one of the attractions of the field is the close contact between experimentalists and theorists. Hydrodynamic instabilities in liquid crystals had already experienced a period of intense study in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but at that time neither the ex­ perimental and theoretical tools nor the concepts had been developed sufficiently far to address the questions that have since been found to be of particular interest. The renewed interest is also evidenced by the fact that a new series of workshops has evolved. The first one took place in 1989 in Bayreuth and united participants from almost all groups working in pattern formation in liquid crystals.

This volume contains papers contributed to the NATO Advanced Research Workshop "Nonlinear Evolution of Spatio-Temporal Structures in Dissipative Continuous Systems" held in Streitberg, Fed. Rep. Germany, Sept. 24 through 30, 1989. The purpose of the rather long title has been to focus attention on a particularly fruitful direction of research within the broad field covered by terms like Nonlinear Dynamics or Non-Equilibrium Systems. After physicists have been occupied for several decades mainly with the microscopic structure of matter, recent years have witnessed a resurgence of interest in macroscopic patterns and dynamics. Research on these latter phenomena has not been dormant, of course, since fluid dynamicists interested in the origin of turbulence, meteorologists studying weather patterns and numerous other scientists have continued to advance the understanding of the structures relevant to their disciplines. The recent progress in the dynamics of nonl inear systems wi th few degrees of freedom and the discovery of universal laws such as the Feigenbaum scaling of period-doubling cascades has given rise to new hopes for the understanding of common principles underlying the spontaneous formation of structures in extended continuous systems.