In recent years, experiments have discovered an exotic new state of
matter known as the strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma (sQGP),
which seems to behave like a nearly perfect fluid. At present, it
seems that standard theoretical tools, such as perturbation theory
and lattice gauge theory, are poorly suited to understand this new
phase. At the same time, progress in superstring theory has provided
us with a theoretical laboratory for studying the hydrodynamic
properties of plasmas in certain strongly interacting gauge
theories. This surprising new perspective may allow us to extract
the fluid properties of the sQGP from physical processes in a black
hole spacetime. Hence we may find the answers to difficult particle
physics questions about the sQGP from straightforward calculations
in classical general relativity.
