The Conley index theory was introduced by Charles C. Conley (1933-1984) in [C1] and a major part of the foundations of the theory was developed in Ph. D. theses of his students, see for example [Ch, Ku, Mon]. The Conley index associates the homotopy type of some pointed space to an isolated invariant set of a flow, just as the fixed point index associates an integer number to an isolated set of fixed points of a continuous map. Examples of isolated invariant sets arise naturally in the critical...