CARL WEIMAN: Our first reaction was, "Wait, we've got to be careful here," you know? "We...let's think of all the different knobs we can turn, checks we can make and so on, to see if this really is Bose-Einstein condensation."
ERIC CORNELL: A condensate is sort of like a vampire. If the sunlight even once falls on it, it's dead. And so its realm is the realm of the dark. But we can take pictures of them, because we strobe the laser light really fast, and, even as the condensate's dying, it casts a shadow, and the shadow is frozen in the film.
NARRATOR: At a temperature of 170-billionth of a degree above absolute zero, Weiman and Cornell created a pure Bose-Einstein condensate in a gas cloud of just 3,000 atoms of rubidium, the first in the universe, as far as we know.
ERIC CORNELL: One of the first things you need to understand about Bose-Einstein condensation is how very, very cold it is. Where we live, at room temperature, is far above absolute zero in the scale.