Little bang at big accelerators: heavy ion physics from AGS to LHC

Since the start of ultra-relativistic heavy ion experimentation, some 10 years ago at the Brookhaven AGS and the CERN SPS, this field has now entered its most decisive and productive phase ever. The advent of a new generation of $9 detectors, and most important, the availability of really heavy ion beams, has led in the last three years to exciting new results which are of relevance to the most crucial questions this field has been addressing since 1986: do we $9 see in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions signs for deconfinement, signs for chiral symmetry restoration, signs for equilibrated hadronic matter? This summary talk sketches a rough picture of the heavy ion program at current and $9 future machines and concentrates on a few important topics. (11 refs).