This conference celebrates the 40th anniversary of the first Rochester Conference and honours Prof. Susumu Okubo on his 60th birthday. The original Rochester Conference brought a small group of leading physicists to discuss current results and trends in both theory and experiment. The present conference has also adhered to this format — covering the developments in particle physics over the last forty years and presenting the latest theoretical and experimental results in the field.

This book has been prepared to celebrate the 65th birthday of Gabriele Veneziano and his retirement from CERN in September 2007. This reti- ment certainly will not mark the end of his extraordinary scienti?c career (in particular, he will remain on the permanent sta? of the Coll` ege de France in Paris), but we believe that this important step deserves a special celebration, and an appropriate recognition of his monumental contribution to physics. Our initial idea of preparing a volume of Selected papers of Professor Gabriele Veneziano, possibly with some added commentary, was dismissed when we realized that this format of book, very popular in former times, has become redundant today because of the full “digitalization” of all important physical journals, and their availability online in the electronic archives. We have thus preferred an alternative (and unconventional, but probably more e?ective) form of celebrating Gabriele’s birthday: a collection of new papers written by his main collaborators and friends on the various aspects of th- retical physics that have been the object of his research work, during his long and fruitful career.

This book contains selected papers of Prof Nambu who is one of the most original and outstanding particle theorists of our time. This volume consists of about 40 papers which made fundamental contributions to our understanding of particle physics during the last few decades.The unpublished lecture note on string theory (1969) and the first paper on spontaneous symmetry breaking (1961) are retyped and included. The book also contains a memoir of Prof Nambu on his research career.

The Dalitz Conference was held to mark the 65th birthday and formal retirement of Professor Dick Dalitz. The Proceedings contain the contributions of the ten distinguished speakers including Professor Dalitz himself, with a focus on the present status of the wide range of subjects in High Energy Physics to which Professor Dalitz has made seminal contributions. The volume also includes a number of contributed talks.