Present Status of the Low Energy Nuclear Physics

I would like to thank all of you for inviting me here and I am very grateful to the Japanese physicists for inviting me and my wife to come to Japan. This is probably the most interesting trip we have ever made. Today I would like to talk about the present situation in low energy nuclear physics. The situation is not too good, as we have seen before early this afternoon. There are many, many new experimental materials, but the theory does not catch up with the experiment. So I would like to just give you a survey of what I think the most important point of interest in low energy physics, and also mention the most important points where we have reached a better understanding, where we are still searching for it. Low energy physics changes very much, and I am afraid that what was written eight years ago in the book by Blatt and myself there is not much which is still correct, and we will have to write a new book pretty soon. Now I would like to divide the topics into four parts. (i) Nuclear Forces. (ii) Nuclear matter. (iii) Deformed nuclei. (iv) Reactions. There are certainly many other questions, but I would like to discuss these four questions, because they seem to me to contain the most important problems. I have not included 13-decay, because I think we now understand this field pretty well, apart from the fundamental question of the nature of the interaction. Due to the discovery of the parity violation, this field has been pretty much cleared up and, once the fundamental interaction is assumed, anything else seem to follow from the calculation and the experiments seem to be in very good agreement with the theory. The fundamental questions connected with 13-decay are rather more part of high energy physics.