  Why should we study mesons in 2002? Two approaches to relating quark and
gluon dynamics to hadron physics, namely QCD sum rules and effective field
theories, are briefly discussed. These are linked by progress in the study of
strong QCD, both by lattice Monte Carlo methods and in the continuum. These
provide the translation from quark dynamics to hadron physics and back again.
Scope for more theoretical work and further experiments to elucidate the nature
of the QCD vacuum and its precise relation to scalar mesons and their
interactions is outlined.
