<
A New Form of Matter
Scientists have created a new kind of matter: It comes in waves and bridges the gap between the everyday world of humans and the micro-domain of quantum physics.
Listen to this story via streaming audio, or a downloadable file (help).
March 20, 2001
It's not often that you get to be around for the birth of a new kind of matter, but when you do, the excitement is tremendous.
"To see something which nobody else has seen before is thrilling and deeply satisfying. Those are the moments when you want to be a scientist," says Wolfgang Ketterle, a physicist at MIT and one of the first scientists to create a new kind of matter called Bose-Einstein condensates.
Nobel prizing-winning scientists used lasers and magnetic fields to create a new form of matter. [learn more]
Image Credit: © 2002 The Nobel Foundation
Bose-Einstein condensates ("BECs" for short) aren't like the solids, liquids and gases that we learned about in school. They are not vaporous, not hard, not fluid. Indeed, there are no ordinary words to describe them because they come from another world -- the world of quantum mechanics.
Quantum mechanics describes the bizarre rules of light and matter on atomic scales. In that realm, matter can be in two places at once; objects behave as both particles and waves (a strange duality described by Schrodinger's wave equation); and nothing is certain: the quantum world runs on probability.
(Full Story Here)
Cheers,
Dan
A New Form of Matter . . .