Аннотация:In 1973 two Salam protégés (Derek Capper and the author) discovered that the conformal invariance under Weyl rescalings of the metric tensor 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.
