The modern Institute of Physics and its predecessors have served the needs of physics and physicists for 125 years. In celebration of this anniversary, 125 Years: The Physical Society and The Institute of Physics charts the history of the Institute from its origins to the present day. It provides a fascinating account of the people and events that shaped the Institute's development and includes the: Emergence of physics as a separate scientific discipline Formation of the Physical Society of London Establishment of the Institute of Physics Granting of a Royal Charter to the Institute of Physics Final decades of the millennium Separate chapters are devoted to the educational, professional, and publishing activities of the Institute. Pioneers such as Guthrie, Glazebrook, and Phillips could not have envisaged the ways in which the modern Institute has developed, but would surely approve of the way it is moving forward to the next millennium.

Since the publication in 1950 of Vol. I, Spectra of Diatomic Molecules of Molecular Spectra and Molecular Structure, much progress has been made in the field. While there have been some important refinements in the theory of diatomic molecular spectra, most of the advances have been in the further exploration of individual spectra. Not only has the number of molecules about which some spectroscopic data are available been increased by a factor of 2 to 3, but also the spectroscopic information about the molecules known in 1950 has been vastly extended. This is due to the observation of new elec tronic states (about three times as many as known before), the enormous improvements in the accuracy of the constants of the states known in 1950, and the determination of higher order constants. In view of the increasing use of spectroscopic information on diatomic molecules in other fields of physics, in chemistry, and in astrophysics, it appeared desirable to prepare an up-to-date version of the table of molecular constants in the appendix of Vol. I. This updating proved to be far more time-consuming than originally anticipated, and it is only now, 10 years that we are able to present such a table, which, instead after its initiation, of the original 80 pages (plus 30 pages of bibliography), now fills a volume of 700 pages. In the interest of economy, and unlike the original version, the new table has been produced by photo-offset from the final manuscript.

This volume of proceedings deals with a wide variety of topics OCo both in theory and in experiment OCo in particle physics, such as electroweak theory, tests of the Standard Model and beyond, heavy quark physics, nonperturbative QCD, neutrino physics, astroparticle physics, quantum gravity effects, and physics at the future accelerators."