Although predicted by physicists Satyendranath Bose (1894-1974) and Albert Einstein (1879-1955) in the early 1920s, the unusual state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate was not created until 1995, when a team led by Eric Cornell and Carl Weiman at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics in Boulder, Colorado, brought the first known example of this non-naturally occurring substance into existence by cooling rubidium atoms to less than 170 billionths of a degree above absolute zero.

Bose wrote equations describing the behavior of photons under the laws of quantum mechanics; these equations were elaborated by Einstein to include fundamental particles and the atoms made of those particles. The resulting Bose-Einstein equations describe the behavior of certain types of particles. According to the Standard Model developed in the later half of the twentieth century, there are two classes of particles in the universe: bosons, named in honor of...