Physics Colloquium

I will present an overview of recent theoretical developments related to the science program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Beginning from heavy ion collisions and the creation of the quark gluon plasma, the most perfect and hottest fluid every created on earth, I will proceed to discuss smaller collision systems, like proton+lead collisions. The experimental data from these show strikingly similar features to heavy ion collisions and I will discuss their possible origins. If the physics in these small systems is also dominated by the fluid dynamic behavior of the created matter, experimental measurements combined with theoretical models give us unprecedented access to the fluctuating shape of the proton.