  This is an overview of the results from the first 3 years of RHIC
experiments. RHIC is a collider built to accelerate nuclei to center of mass
energies of 200 GeV per nucleon for the study of QCD in bulk systems. The most
important result so far is the observation of the suppression of high p$_T$
hadrons in central Au-Au collisions followed by the subsequent null experiment
where the same suppression was not seen in deuteron-Au collisions. The observed
suppression is a final state effect in which a large amount of energy is lost
by the fast parton as it penetrates the medium. This observation, together with
measurements of the elliptic flow, leads to the conclusion that the energy
density reached is at least 10 times that of a normal nucleon. The simplest and
most economical explanation of these phenomenon is that the system is a dense,
locally thermalized system of unscreened color charges.
