Particle Physics and the Universe

The Adriatic Meetings have traditionally been conferences on the most - vanced status of science. They are one of the very few conferences in physics aiming at a very broad participation of young and experienced researchers with di? erent backgrounds in particle physics. Particle physics has grown into a highly multi-faceted discipline over the sixty years of its existence, mainly because of two reasons: Particle physics as an experimental science is in need of large-scale laboratory set-ups, involving typically collaborations of several hundreds or even thousands of researchers and technicians with the most diverse expertise. This forces particle physics, being one of the most fundamental dis- plines of physics, to maintain a constant interchange and contact with other disciplines, notably solid-state physics and laser physics, cosmology and - trophysics, mathematical physics and mathematics. Since the expertise necessary in doing research in particle physics has become tremendously demanding in the last years, the ? eld tends to organize purely expert conferences, meetings and summer schools, such as for detector development, for astroparticle physics or for string theory. TheAdriaticMeetingthroughitsentirehistoryhasbeenaplaceforest- lishing exchange between theory and experiment. The 9th Adriatic Meeting successfully continued this tradition and even intensi? ed the cross-discipline communication by establishing new contacts between the community of c- mologists and of particle physicists. The exchange between theorists and - perimentalists was impressively intensive and will certainly have a lasting e? ect on several research projects of the European and world-wide physics community.