A seminar held in Mumbai on Thursday on 'Physics with Cooled and Trapped Atoms and Ions (PCTAI-98)' is the first meeting in the exotic field of cooled and trapped atoms and ions, organised in India. Scientists from national laboratories and experts from abroad were present. This area of research is at present at the forefronts of physics as may be gauged from the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics which was awarded to Steven Chu, W D Phillips and C Cohen Tannoudji for their pioneering work.