Frontiers of Fundamental Physics 4, Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2001

This symposium was organized at the B.M. Birla Science Centre, Hyderabad, India, and provided a platform for frontier physicists to exchange ideas and review the latest work and developments on a variety of interrelated topics. A feature of the symposium, as well as the proceedings, is the B.M. Birla Memorial Lecture by Nobel Laureate Professor Gerard 't Hooft. There were participants from the USA, several European countries, Russia and CIS countries, South Africa, Japan, India and elsewhere, of whom some forty scientists presented papers. Spanning a wide range of contemporary issues in fundamental physics from string theory to cosmology, the proceedings present many of these talks and contributions.

1. A Confrontation with infinity.- 2. The self-intersecting brane world.- 3. A model of the spacetime foam.- 4. Anti-grand unification and the phase transitions at the Planck scale in gauge theories.- 5. The structure of the Yang-Mills Vacuum seen by distant observers.- 6. Scale relativity and non-differentiable fractal space-time.- 7. ’t Hooft dimensional regularization implies transfinite Heterotic string theory and dimensional transmutation.- 8. The Cantorian gravity coupling constant is ?gs(max) = 1/26.18033989.- 9. Fuzzy, non commutative spacetime: A new paradigm for a new century.- 10. Quarks as vortices in vacuum.- 11. ?4 - Field theory on a Lie group.- 12. From quantum action to quantum chaos.- 13. Resolution of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen nonlocality puzzle.- 14. Classical and quantum solutions of 2+1 dimensional gravity.- 15. Gravitational collapse.- 16. Gravitational wave and spiral galaxy (Gravito-Radiative Force).- 17. Cosmology as a fonnat of perceiving reality.- 18. Schwarzschild metrics, quasi-universes and wormholes.- 19. Normalized Weyl-type *-product on Kahler manifolds.- 20. Non-dopplerian cosmological redshift parameters in a model of graviton-dusty universe.- 21. Deformed algebras,q-Hermite polynomials and q-Bessel functions.- 22. Quantum Hamilton-Jacobi formalism and broken supersymmetric WKB approximation scheme.- 23. Theory of quantum Hall effect: Effective fractional charge.- 24. Large fractals in condensed matter physics.- 25. Canonical forms of positive definite matrices under congruence: Extensions of the Schweinler-Wigner extremum principle.- 26. A novel method to solve familiar differential equations and its applications.- 27. Towards a Landau-Ginzburg theory for granular fluids.- 28. The concept of probability in statisticalmechanics.- 29. The “mass boom”: The effect of the expansion of the universe on the fundamental “Constants”.- 30. Do virtual field quanta follow geodesics?.- 31. Masses and fields in microdynamics: A possible foundation for dynamic gravity.- 32. Consistent equation of classical gravitation to quantum limit and beyond.