The purpose of this volume is to trace the development of the
theoretical understanding of quark-gluon plasma, both in terms of the
equation of state and thermal correlation functions and in terms of
its manifestation in high energy nuclear collisions. Who among us has
not wondered how tall a mountain is on a neutron star, what happens
when matter is heated and compressed to higher and higher densities,
what happens when an object falls into a black hole, or what happened
eons ago in the early universe? The study of quark-gluon plasma is
related in one way or...

The fundamental goal of physics is an understanding of the forces of nature in their simplest and most general terms. Yet there is much more involved than just a basic set of equations which eventually has to be solved when applied to specific problems. We have learned in recent years that the structure of the ground state of field theories (with which we are generally concerned) plays an equally funda mental role as the equations of motion themselves. Heisenberg was probably the first to recognize that the ground state, the vacuum, could acquire certain prop erties (quantum numbers) when he...