The Institute for History and Foundations of Mathematics and the Natural Sciences organized this symposium on March 20, 1998. This symposium was part of the festivities in the opening week of the new Minnaert building of Utrecht University.

The symposium focussed on two topics in the research of the foundations of physics which have become more prominent in the last couple of years:

• Locality and localization in relativistic quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, and
• The foundations of statistical physics.