The origins of this monograph can be found in a game of bridge played one evening at the 1994 Gordon Conference on High-Temperature Chemistry in Meriden, USA, the participants being Jimmie Edwards of the University of Toledo, Shankar Krishnan, then at Containerless Research Inc. (CRI), and Marie-Louise Saboungi and myself, then at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL). The outcome of the game is best left unrecorded, but a more fortunate consequence of the evening's proceedings was the inauguration of a CRI–ANL collaboration on structural studies of aerodynamically levitated liquids, first with neutrons at the Intense Pulsed Neutron Source at Argonne and subsequently with X-rays at the National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven, supported by a Small Business Innovative Research Grant from the US Department of Energy. Many interesting experiments ensued, some of which are described in this work. A few years later, Marie-Louise Saboungi and I were invited by Jean-Pierre Coutures, Director of the Center for Research on Materials at High-Temperature (CRMHT), Orléans, France, for a three-month visit. This led to an eventual move to Orléans, with occasional breaks at places like Trinity College, Cambridge, where the idea of writing a book for Cambridge University Press came up.

The monograph that resulted aims to summarize the state of the art of the measurement of structural, dynamic and physical properties with levitation techniques, the considerable progress made in the past two decades and the prospects for the future.