unfruitful, to contemplate a brute force assault from first principles, since small errors in large cancelling quantities will dominate the computed answers.

But it would be dereliction of duty, and a lost opportunity, to abandon the field entirely. A major goal of lattice gauge theory should be to compute the parameters of effective field theories, formulated in terms of pion and nucleon degrees of freedom, from first principles. (Then the effective theories could be turned over to many-body theorists.) Specifically, we should verify that the theory generates such key features as the hard core and the spin-orbit force, which are central to qualitative aspects of nuclear physics. And we should get a convincing qualitative explanation of these effects, backed up by exploration of QCD variants (see below).

It would also be amusing, and instructive, to explore the limits of “nuclear” physics as we know it. Why are there nuclei at all? In other words, Why does the nuclear force saturate? Or in modern terms, Why do protons and neutrons in nuclei retain their individual identity, rather than agglomerating into a single shared bag? Does this occur for two-color QCD, or for supersymmetric QCD? – maybe not, since in both these 