deserve to be addressed quantitatively. While now no one doubts that there is universal behavior near the critical point, it remains to quantify how wide the critical region is, and how important are the critical fluctuations against the background of conventional thermodynamic behavior. These are abstract but precise forms of the very basic question, What is the hadronic fluid like near the phase transition? Is it dominated by color gauge fields (glue degrees of freedom), so that the collective behavior of the critical $\pi$ and $\sigma$ fields are a minor side-show? Or is it best pictured as a strongly interacting meson gas? In the former case, the critical singularities will be blips on a smooth background; in the latter case, they will be fractionally large or even dominant. The location of the critical point ($T_c$ well below glueball masses, or even the scale set by the QCD string tension) and that it is well below the $T_{c^\prime}$ for deconfinement in the pure glue theory, suggest to me that the latter result is more likely, but I’m not at all certain.

To do justice to these problems, one must both respect the chiral symmetry and work in large spatial volumes, so 