I should like to begin by expressing regret for not having been able to be present for the last Fermilab meeting, at which I had been asked to give the final talk about what it was like to be a student of theoretical physics in the late forties, the end of the period covered by that meeting. I still hope to present that material somewhere. Between that conference and this one there were two others, one in Paris in the summer of 1982, where I gave a talk about my experiences with strangeness, and one in 1983, in Sant Feliu de Guíxols in Catalunya, where I spoke on the subject “Particle Theory from S-Matrix to Quarks.” That second conference was called a “trobada” in the Catalan language, a word that reminds us of the troubadours of the Middle Ages who flourished in Catalunya. It reminds us also that we have become much like those medieval minstrels. We spend a great deal of time now traveling from one orgy of reminiscence to another, each one held in the capital of some princely state. Here I am helping to close another “trobada.”

Let me repeat something I said in Catalunya: I shall once again commit the sin of hindsight in the eyes of some of those historians of science who come from the historical tradition.