Fifty Years of Cosmology -- Science as an Adventure -- The Early Universe -- The Long-Term Future of Particle Accelerators -- Energy and Evolution -- The Wonders of Pulsars -- Is the Future Given? Changes in Our Description of Nature -- Bubbles, Foams and Other Fragile Objects -- Beyond the Standard Model: Will it be the Theory of Everything? -- Living Joyfully with Complexity in Chemistry and Culture -- A Confrontation with Infinity -- The Creative and Unpredictable Interaction of Science and Technology -- The Link Between Neutrino Masses and Proton Decay in Supersymmetric Unification -- The Nature of Discovery in Physics -- Symmetry in the Micro World - A Conversation with Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner.

Shortly after its inauguration in 1985 the Birla Science Centre, Hyderabad, India, started a series of lectures by Nobel Laureates and other scientists of international renown, usually in Physics and Astronomy, sometimes in Life Sciences and Chemistry. The present collection mostly consists of lectures on frontier topics. The transcript of each lecture is preceded by a short biography of the Nobel Laureate/Scientist in question. The lectures are aimed at, and accessible to a wide non-specialist but higher educated audience.