ABSTRACT
In the late 1800s, physics appeared too much as a field that had reached its limit. It was thought that given enough perseverance everything could be understood, based on established laws like electromagnetics, mechanics and hydrodynamics. This chapter summarizes some of the outstanding major issues, the approaches made towards tackling these and, in particular, the role played by microgravity and space research. “Soft matter” is a name given by the 1991 Nobel Prize Laureate Pierre-Gilles de Gennes to a class of substances that exhibit macroscopic softness and whose structure and dynamics is not governed by quantum effects. The behavior and self-organization of matter at the individual particle level appears to be one of the most interesting regions of contemporary research. In most of the research topics in dust physics, microgravity provides a unique even essential environment.
