M. Barone – författare

The Olympia conference Frontiers of Fundamental Physics was a gathering of about hundred scientists who carryon their research in conceptually important areas of physical science (they do "fundamental physics"). Most of them were physicists, but also historians and philosophers of science were well represented. An important fraction of the participants could be considered "heretical" because they disagreed with the validity of one or several fundamental assumptions of modern physics. Common to all participants was an excellent scientific level coupled with a remarkable intellectual honesty: we are proud to present to the readers this certainly unique book. Alternative ways of considering fundamental matters should of course be vitally important for the progress of science, unless one wanted to admit that physics at the end of the XXth century has already obtained the final truth, a very unlikely possibility even if one accepted the doubtful idea of the existence of a "final" truth. The merits of the Olympia conference should therefore not be judged a priori in a positive or in a negative way depending on one's refusal or acceptance, respectively, but considered after reading the actual of basic principles of contemporary science, new proposals and evidences there presented. They seem very important to us.

The Olympia conference Frontiers of Fundamental Physics was a gathering of about hundred scientists who carryon their research in conceptually important areas of physical science (they do "fundamental physics"). Most of them were physicists, but also historians and philosophers of science were well represented. An important fraction of the participants could be considered "heretical" because they disagreed with the validity of one or several fundamental assumptions of modern physics. Common to all participants was an excellent scientific level coupled with a remarkable intellectual honesty: we are proud to present to the readers this certainly unique book. Alternative ways of considering fundamental matters should of course be vitally important for the progress of science, unless one wanted to admit that physics at the end of the XXth century has already obtained the final truth, a very unlikely possibility even if one accepted the doubtful idea of the existence of a "final" truth. The merits of the Olympia conference should therefore not be judged a priori in a positive or in a negative way depending on one''s refusal or acceptance, respectively, but considered after reading the actual of basic principles of contemporary science, new proposals and evidences there presented. They seem very important to us.

This book introduces needed theoretical instruments and offers an up-to-date discussion on fundamental physics as well as the experimental tools used and developed for the construction and exploitation of gravitational wave antennae (resonant bars, ground-based and space interferometric detectors). In addition, problems in the fields of optics, signal processing, control and feedback in active mechanical filtering are deeply analyzed, with reference to recent solutions adopted in the main detectors.

This book features up-to-date technology applications to radiation detection. It synthesises several techniques of and approaches to radiation detection, covering a wide range of applications and addressing a large audience of experts and students.Many of the talks are in fact reviews of particular topics often not covered in standard books and other conferences, for instance, the medical physics section. To present these medical physics talks is crucial, since a large fraction of the community in medical physics are from the particle physics community. The same feature is true for astroparticle and space physics, which are relatively new fields.This book is unique in its scope. Except for IEEE, there is no other conference in the world that presents such a wide coverage of advanced technology applied to particle physics. However, unlike IEEE, more room is made in the book for reviews and general talks.