Wess had a nice humorous way of defusing tense situations. I will try to answer that later. That was my dream from the beginning. Anyway, I hope that from these vague descriptions you get some sense of the ferment going on in mathematical physics these days. Everyone agrees that quantum theory should change our ideas about geometry.
Nobody agrees on how.
Now let me turn to Alekseev's talk. In addition to describing his own work, he explained many things I'd already heard about. For this, I'll assume you know about deRham cohomology, principal bundles, connections and curvature. But now suppose that some Lie group G acts on M in a smooth way. First suppose that G acts freely on M - meaning that gx is different from x for any point x of M and any element g of G other than the identity.