Opening

In the name of the organizing committee, it is a great pleasure to welcome all of you to Claudio’s Fest, a meeting in which we shall celebrate the scientific work accomplished so far by Claudio. It has become customary to choose the 60th birthday for such celebrations and we have followed the tradition, although we all know that a scientific career does not stop at 60 and that we shall therefore miss all the important scientific contributions that are still to come.

Your presence with us today is a clear homage that the international scientific community is paying to a great scientist. The meeting is organized by CECS, with support from the International Solvay Institutes, of which Claudio is an honorary member.

“Quantum Mechanics of Fundamental Systems: The Quest for Beauty and Simplicity” is the title that we have chosen for the conference. This is a wink to the early days of CECS, since the physics meetings organized by Claudio in Santiago in the 1980s, when the center was just created, were precisely entitled “Quantum Mechanics of Fundamental Systems.” We hope that the present conference will carry the same pioneering spirit, the same freshness, the same driving enthusiasm as those heroic meetings and that we shall all remember it as one of these unusual conferences where something magic occurred.