5-6 June "The fiendlike skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough in themselves to distinguish the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth". A century and a half after Herman Melville wrote these words in Typee, further instruments of doom are being added to the white civilized man’s burden, many of which are commonly related to scientific and technological breakthroughs. Misfortune tellers are having a field day predicting the worst-ever millennium and exploiting the threats posed by the swift change we now experience. There are, however, rational ways of apprehending the future and its dangers, of mapping the patterns elicited from past history and today’s trends, as well as the emergence of new opportunities. Rationality alone is not enough to allay fin de millénaire gloom, but it helps. The ten Nobel Laureates and the international experts invited in Milan are asked to act as "mankind’s civil servants" - as Husserl, who was one of them, said - and to reflect upon what lies ahead.

What are High Energy Physicists for? Saturday 6 December 1997 What donšt we know about particles? A lot! Is there a Higgs? The theory needs it but it has not been found. Grand Unification: it is expected that all three interactions are "unified" in the final theory. But how? There are many options, but nothing convincing has yet come out. The Standard Model has many ad hoc constants, e.g. the number of families, the 14 masses of the particles, the three coupling constants. All these must have some "reason" in a complete theory. At temperatures of the order of .15 GeV, nuclear matter is expected to undergo fundamental changes. This "quark-gluon plasma" is being hunted, but has not yet been seen convincingly. Our universe is matter-antimatter asymmetric. This asymmetry underlies the formation of the early universe, of barionic matter. It is not yet understood. It would be easy to add other equally fundamental questions, but this should give some measure of the motivation for continuing the study of particles and their interactions. Other questions have to do with the fact that the particle physics that we study has no conceivable economic usefulness.