Local equilibrium is the precursor of global equilibrium and the hot spot effect can be used to determine how fast, if at all, the transition from local to global equilibrium takes place. That this transition does not always happen follows from the fact that the duration of a strong interaction reaction is quite short (of the order of 10 –10 seconds) and the propagation of "heat", i.e. of the excitation, through the finite sized body of the system takes a finite time, which is determined by the thermal conductivity of the matter the system is made of. Indications of the transition between local and global equilibrium in strong interaction particle physics started to emerge in the 1960s and early 1970s. In high-energy strong interactions equilibrium is usually not complete. In these reactions, with the increase of laboratory energy one observes that the transverse momenta of produced particles have a tail, which deviates from the single exponential Boltzmann spectrum, characteristic for global equilibrium. The slope or the effective temperature of this transverse momentum tail increases with increasing energy. These large transverse momenta were interpreted as being due to particles, which "leak" out before equilibrium is reached. Similar observations had been made in nuclear reactions and were also attributed to pre-equilibrium effects. This interpretation suggested that the equilibrium is neither instantaneous, nor global, but rather local in space and time. By predicting a specific asymmetry in peripheral high-energy hadron reactions based on the hot spot effect Richard M. Weiner proposed a direct test of this hypothesis as well as of the assumption that the heat conductivity in hadronic matter is relatively small. The theoretical analysis of the hot spot effect in terms of propagation of heat was performed in Ref.