"The career structure and funding of the universities [. . . ]
currently strongly d- courages academics and faculties from putting any
investment into teaching - there are no career or ?nancial rewards in
it. This is a great pity, because [. . . ] it is the need toengage
indialogue, and to makethings logicaland clear, that istheprimary
defence against obscurantism and abstraction. " B. Ward-Perkins, The
fall of Rome, Oxford (2005) This is the ?rst volume of a planned
two-volume treatise on non-equilibrium phase transitions. While such a
topic might sound rather special and a- demic, non-equilibrium critical
phenomena occur in much wider contexts than their equilibrium
counterparts, and without having to ?ne-tune th- modynamic variables to
their 'critical' values in each case. As a matter of fact, most systems
in Nature are out of equilibrium. Given that the theme of
non-equilibrium phase transitions of second order is wide enough to
amount essentially to a treatment of almost all theoretical aspects of
non-equilibrium many-body physics, a selection of topics is required to
keep such a project within a manageable length. Therefore, Vol. 1
discusses a particular kind of non-equilibrium phase transitions, namely
those between an active, ?- tuating state and absorbing states. Volume 2
(to be written by one of us (MH) with M. Pleimling) will be devoted to
ageing phenomena.