Physicists have been searching for the quark-gluon soup for almost two decades. In 2000, after years of effort, the leading European particle-physics laboratory called CERN presented circumstantial evidence that it had produced the rare form of matter, but ultimately stopped short of announcing a major discovery. Now RHIC, finishing up it’s initial runs smashing gold ions together at by far the highest energies yet, is in the beginning stages of going beyond the tentative European work with so-far intriguing results. Further research began Sunday to see if the RHIC gold-gold results really represent a breakthrough and if similar results can be seen in gold-hydrogen collisions. RHIC hopes to make an airtight case in a year or two that quark-gluon soup is being routinely created…if the whole RHIC lab doesn’t implode into a self-made black hole first.