Book excerpt: These proceedings reflect the work presented at the conference "Interferometry in Speckle Light: Theory and Applications", held at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, (EPFL), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland. The event took place from September 25 to September 28, 2000. Thanks to the diligence of the authors, this book has been published just in time for the conference. Writing this preface in July, in anticipation of the conference, we have tried to envisage how this book will benefit the quality of discourse between authors and attendees. "Interferometry in Speckle Light: Theory and Applications" results from a bottom-up approach and is original in several ways. This conference is not part of a series; on the contrary, it is a single event. The idea of gathering scientists and engineers for a general discussion on the theory and the practice of interferometry, involving rough, non-optically polished objects, was "in the air". An opportunity of this sort was not provided by any of the conferences scheduled when the present one was conceived. For this reason, it was easy to convince a small number of renowned researchers, all of them active in the field of holographic and speckle interferometry, to organize a conference. To be specific, they are the people listed below as members of the scientific and local committees. At the same time, a particular circumstance, namely the retirement of Professor L. Pflug, helped to detennine the location of the meeting.