High energy nuclear collisions

This presentation covers three broad topics: a brief introduction to the field of nucleus-nucleus collisions at relativistic energies; a discussion of several topics illustrating what`s been learned after more than a decade of fixed target experiments; and an indication of what the future may bring at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) under construction at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) planned at CERN