Twenty years of the Weyl anomaly

Abstract

In 1973 two Salam prot\'{e}g\'{e}s (Derek Capper and the author) discovered that the conformal invariance under Weyl rescalings of the metric tensor $g_{\mu\nu}(x)\rightarrow\Omega^2(x)g_{\mu\nu}(x)$ displayed by classical massless field systems in interaction with gravity no longer survives in the quantum theory. Since then these Weyl anomalies have found a variety of applications in black hole physics, cosmology, string theory and statistical mechanics. We give a nostalgic review. (Talk given at the {\it Salamfest}, ICTP, Trieste, March 1993.)