Galactic globular clusters are ancient building blocks of our Galaxy. They
represent a very interesting family of stellar systems in which some
fundamental dynamical processes have been taking place for more than 10 Gyr,
but on time scales shorter than the age of the universe. In contrast with
galaxies, these star clusters represent unique laboratories for learning about
two-body relaxation, mass segregation from equipartition of energy, stellar
collisions, stellar mergers, core collapse, and tidal disruption. This review
briefly summarizes some of the tremendous developments that have taken place
during the last two decades. It ends with some recent results on tidal tails
around galactic globular clusters and on a very massive globular cluster in
M31.Comment: An invited review (32 pages, 7 figures) in "The Chaotic Universe:
Theory, Observations, Computer Experiments", Proceedings of the ICRA
Rome-Pescara workshop, eds. V.G. Gurzadyan and R. Ruffini (Singapore: World
Sci.), in pres
