Book excerpt: In August/September 2002, a group of 78 physicists from 50 laboratories in 17 countries met in Erice, Italy, to participate in the 40th Course of the International School of Subnuclear Physics. The purpose of the School was to focus attention on the theoretical and phenomenological developments in gauge theories, as well as in all the other sectors of subnuclear physics. Experimental highights from the most relevant sources of new data were presented and discussed, including the latest news on theoretical developments in quantizing the gravitational forces. This volume constitutes the proceedings of the School. It is dedicated to the memory of Victor Frederick Weisskopf, a founder OCo together with John Stewart Bell, Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett and Isidor Isaac Rabi OCo of the OC Ettore MajoranaOCO Centre for Scientific Culture, this School being the first of its 114 Schools now in existence. Contents: Mini-Courses on Basics: Physics of QCD Instantons (E V Shuryak); Confinement and Duality (M J Strassler); Status of Super String Theory (E Verlinde); Perturbative Quantum Gravity (G ''t Hooft); Experimental Highlights: Highlights from Gran Sasso Laboratory (A Bettini); Experimental Highlights from Super-Kamiokande (Y Totsuka); The Fermilab Experimental Physics Program (R Tschirhardt); Special Sessions for New Talents: Application of the Large- N c Limit to a Chiral Lagrangian with Resonances (O Cata); Towards the Finite Temperature Gluon Propagator in Landau Gauge YangOCoMills Theory (A Maas); Hermes Measurements of the Nucleon Spin Structure (J Wendland); and other papers. Readership: High energy, experimental and theoretical physicists."