Just over a year ago, a rare event took place at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York. It didn't happen in the lab's massive atom smasher, but in a packed seminar room. Here experimentalists and theorists collided in a very public manner at a special colloquium held to announce "exciting new results". Since June 2000, Brookhaven's particle accelerator, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), has smashed atoms together in a bid to make an extremely hot state of matter with a name only a physicist could love: the quark-gluon plasma. For decades, theorists have been creating detailed models of this plasma, which was thought to exist in the early Universe, and RHIC was built in an attempt to confirm refute these calculations.
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