To condense, or not to condense, that is the question

Recent key experimental results on the spectroscopy of ¹²C have been made, which, when taken together, provide much needed clarity on the structure of the ground- and Hoyle- state excitations and provided new avenues for future research. High excitation energies in light nuclei are being explored with evermore precision and recent examples of this in ¹²C, ¹⁶O and ²⁰Ne are presented. These steps forward are examined and the outstanding issue of clustering versus condensation explored