Closing Remarks

Abstract

The great potential of radio recombination lines (RL) for providing diagnostics of the physical conditions and abundances in many Astronomical objects has been clearly established for several years now. This workshop has shown their possible applications to a still greater variety of sources, and I expect some very exciting science to be learned from the min the future. The big questions are, how reliable are they as diagnostics—can they provide unambigious information about Nature? Do we really know who they are produced in a given plasma? Are they so subject to the vagaries of fluctuating conditions along the line of sight that they are of very limited quantitative use? A great deal of the workshop has been concerned with these questions. I will address them before giving a short and subjective discussion of applications to various objects. Since often the same point was raised by several speakers, I will not mention individual contributors in most instances.