Clustering statistics and dynamics

Since the appearance of the classical paper of Lifshitz almost half a century ago, linear stability analysis of cosmological models is textbook knowledge. Until recently, however, little was known about the behavior of higher than linear order terms in the perturbative expansion. These terms become important in the weakly nonlinear regime of gravitational clustering, when the rms mass density contrast is only slightly smaller than unity. In the past, theorists showed little interest in studying this regime, and for a good reason: only a decade ago, it would have been an academic excercise - at scales large enough to probe the weakly nonlinear regime, all measures of clustering were dominated by noise. This is no longer the case with present data. The purpose of this talk is to provide a brief summary of recent advances in weakly nonlinear perturbation theory. We present analytical perturbative results together with results of N-body experiments, conducted to test their accuracy. We compare perturbative predictions with measurements from galaxy surveys. Such comparisons can be used to test the gravitational instability theory and to constrain possible deviations from Gaussian statistics in the initial mass distribution; they can be also used to study the nature of physical processes that govern galaxy formation (``biasing''). We also show how future studies of velocity field statistics can provide a new way to determine the density parameter, $\Omega$.