For three days Eric Cornell kept rechecking his computer, not quite willing to believe what his eyes and his instruments were telling him. There on the screen was a dense knot of something that had appeared in a cloud of rubidium atoms. Finally, Cornell had to acknowledge that it could mean only one thing: he and his colleagues had created a new form of matter, predicted by Albert Einstein more than 70 years ago but never before seen on earth. Called a Bose-Einstein condensate, it is a kind of "superatom," in which individual atoms lose their separate identities and merge into...
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