It has to be a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt. We have to convince ourselves that the signals we see are caused only by the formation of the quark-gluon plasma and nothing else. The collisions will be studied with four of the most advanced detectors for high energy particles yet designed. Physicists expect that RHIC will shed new light on the theory of quarks and gluons, known as quantum chromodynamics, or QCD for short. QCD is a very accurate theory, but many of its details remain to be filled in.
Nuclear physicists are uniformly positive about the new facility.
Joe Kapusta of the University of Minnesota asks rhetorically. Mankind now has the ability to figuratively go back 12 billion years to within that one microsecond of when it all began.