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This is an extended version of the note taken by the first author (W.-G.P.) on a lecture given by the second author (M.R.) as a first part of the series on "Hadronic Matter Under Extreme Conditions," the principal theme of the WCU-Hanyang Program. It covers the attempts to go in a framework anchored on effective field theory of QCD from zero density to the nuclear matter density and slightly beyond, with the ultimate goal of arriving at the density relevant to compact stars, including chiral phase transition and quark matter. The focus is on the conceptual aspects rather than detailed "fitting" of the data on the kinds of physics that are being addressed to in radioactive-ion-beam machines in operation as well as in project (such as "KoRIA" in Korea) and will be explored at such forthcoming accelerators as FAIR/GSI. The approach presented here is basically different from the standard ones found in the literature in that the notion of hidden local symmetry — which underlies the chiral symmetry of the strong interactions — and its generalization to dual gravity description involving infinite tower of hidden gauge fields are closely relied on.

Probing dense hadronic matter is thus far an uncharted field of physics. Here we give a brief summary of the highlights of what has been so far accomplished and what will be done in the years ahead by the World Class University III Project at Hanyang University in the endeavor to unravel and elucidate the multifacet of the cold dense baryonic matter existing in the interior of the densest visible stable object in the universe, i.e. neutron stars, strangeness stars and/or quark stars, from a modest and simplified starting point of an effective field theory modeled on the premise of QCD as well as from a gravity dual approach of hQCD. The core of the matter of our research is the possible origin of the ~ 99% of the proton mass that is to be accounted for and how the "vacuum" can be tweaked so that the source of the mass generation can be uncovered by measurements made in terrestrial as well as space laboratories. Some of the issues treated in the program concern what can be done — both theoretically and experimentally — in anticipation of what's to come for basic physics research in Korea.

I describe the long-standing search for a “smoking-gun” signal for the manifestation of (scale-)chiral symmetry in nuclear interactions. It is prompted by Gerry Brown’s last unpublished note, reproduced verbatim below, on the preeminent role of pions and vector ($\rho ,\omega$) mesons in providing a simple and elegant description of strongly correlated nuclear interactions. In this note written in tribute to Gerry Brown, I first describe a case of an unambiguous signal in axial-charge transitions in nuclei and then combine his ideas with the more recent development on the role of hidden symmetries in nuclear physics. What transpires is the surprising conclusion that the Landau–Migdal fixed point interaction $G_0^{\prime }$, the nuclear tensor forces and Brown–Rho scaling, all encoded in scale-invariant hidden local symmetry, as Gerry put, “run the show and make all forces equal.”