The impact of gravitating lensing on astrophysics

Abstract

The present meeting is a successor to the successful conference held two years ago in Toulouse. On that occasion, Roger Blandford gave the summary talk, in which he concluded that, despite the observational progress over the previous decade, lensing had made disappointingly little impact on general astrophysics. He is giving the summary at the end of this meeting too, and it will be interesting to see if he is more optimistic and encouraged. We can, however, be confident that there will be many new results reported this week, representing substantial advances over what was known at the time of the Toulouse conference, and that his summary will therefore not be a repeat of his earlier one.

To avoid duplication with the later papers in this book, I have listed only a few ‘historical’ papers. Apart from these proceedings, full surveys of the literature are given in two books on gravitational lensing: Blikh, P. V. and Minakov A. A. 1987. (Naukaova Dumka,Kiev) Schneider, P., Ehlers, J. and Falco, E.E 1992. (Springer-Verlag) in press.