Wolfgang Ketterle, Eric Cornell, and Carl Wieman at MIT achieved the first Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC: atoms at very low temperatures condense into a single object with peculiar properties) in the laboratory. Two thousand rubidium atoms at 0.000000001K reached the BEC for ten seconds, a single, icy agglomeration (as if it were a single atom), shapeless and fragile like nothing before it in the universe. For this, the three shared the Nobel Prize in 2001.
