Preface

The First Australasian Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation (ACGRG1) was held at the University of Adelaide in February, 1996. Strictly speaking it is by no means the first such conference, as three Australasian conferences on general relativity were held at Monash University, Melbourne and the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, in the early 1970s. These were succeeded by a number of workshops on general relativity at Monash and the A.N.U. in the early 1990s, and the international Marcel Grossmann meeting was held in Perth in 1986. Finally there was the inaugural workshop at the A.N.U., Canberra, in September 1994, where the idea of forming an Australasian Society for General Relativity and Gravitation was first mooted. ACGRG1 coincided with the official launch of the Society, which we hope ushers a new era for research into general relativity and gravitational physics in the Australia-New Zealand region.

The nature of research in general relativity and gravitation has certainly changed vastly from those earlier Australasian conferences 25 years ago. Most importantly, the prospect of detecting gravitational waves means that the community of Australian mathematical relativists has been joined by physicists specialising in the building of detectors, both the bar detectors which have long been the subject of pioneering work by the group at the University of Western Australia, and laser interferometers for which three Australian universities have pooled their resources in ACIGA, the Australian Consortium for Interferometric Gravitational Astronomy. This represents a considerable widening of interest in gravitational physics in our region, and offers many opportunities for cross-cultural collaboration. Furthermore, the modelling of the final collapse of in-spiralling neutron stars and black holes involves sophisticated numerical analysis in order to determine the shape and amplitude of characteristic waveforms we might expect to see with gravitational wave detectors. Computing power has increased dramatically over the last 25 years, and numerical investigations which were not feasible for an earlier generation of relativists are now a possibility. Many such studies are underway in Australia, as is reported in this proceedings.

Gravitation remains a frontier of the most fundamental research - it is the only area of physics where a consistent quantum theory has yet to be formulated. Many challenges remain in this and other areas of gravitational physics, as is evident from the papers in this proceedings. We hope that such challenges will provide fertile ground for discussions at future conferences in the series.

Finally, thanks are due to fellow members of the local organising committee - Dr Peter Szekeres and Dr Peter Veitch - for their assistance, and also to Prof. Tony Thomas and the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Adelaide, both for the generous financial support without which the Conference would not have been possible, and also for the organisational efforts of Mrs Sharon Johnson, who ensured that things went off without too many hitches.

D.L. Wiltshire