2008 Woodie Awards
Nobel Prize winner part of physics lecture series
Madeline Novey
Issue date: 10/10/08 Section: News
"I'm really glad to be here-I'd like to talk to you about some very, very cold things today," Nobel Prize winner Eric Cornell said to an audience of about 150 physics junkies, professors, community members and students at the start of his lecture about his experimental discovery of Bose-Einstein condensation, the coldest matter on earth, Thursday.
Cornell and his colleagues, Carl Wieman and Wolfgan Ketterle, won the Nobel Prize in 2001 for their discovery of Bose-Einstein condensation, BEC.
Cornell is a noted physics professor at CU-Boulder, working with Wieman as a physicist at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophyiscs, and was invited to speak based on his work in the field of physics.
Most simply put, BEC is gas that is cooled by lasers to extreme temperatures far colder than the freezing temperatures in the farthest depths of space. The collection of atoms that make up the gas, whose movement is almost completely stopped by the cooling process, form matter that Cornell said will advance the technological world with improvements to military and computer developments.
Throughout the night, Cornell cracked jokes and used anecdotes about Jell-O and coffee to make the advanced scientific content of his lecture "Stone Cold Physics," understandable and accessible even to the non-physicist. His humorous presentation was part of the Galeener Lecture Series held every two to three years in honor of CSU physics professor Frank Galeener, who died in 1992.
"I normally give this talk to a room full of physicists," Cornell said as he promised to keep the mathematical equations to a minimum. He kept his promise and used words like "fuzzy" to describe the matter and phrases that included "Box O' Cold Atoms" and "New Teckology" to relay components of the complex experiment.
The Science
Research on the Bose-Einstein matter began with physicists Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Eistein in the early 1920s. Interest in the concept picked up and rapidly expanded in the 1980s with experiments by scientists at the Massachusets Institute of Technology and other universities.
Cornell and his colleagues, Carl Wieman and Wolfgan Ketterle, won the Nobel Prize in 2001 for their discovery of Bose-Einstein condensation, BEC.
Cornell is a noted physics professor at CU-Boulder, working with Wieman as a physicist at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophyiscs, and was invited to speak based on his work in the field of physics.
Most simply put, BEC is gas that is cooled by lasers to extreme temperatures far colder than the freezing temperatures in the farthest depths of space. The collection of atoms that make up the gas, whose movement is almost completely stopped by the cooling process, form matter that Cornell said will advance the technological world with improvements to military and computer developments.
Throughout the night, Cornell cracked jokes and used anecdotes about Jell-O and coffee to make the advanced scientific content of his lecture "Stone Cold Physics," understandable and accessible even to the non-physicist. His humorous presentation was part of the Galeener Lecture Series held every two to three years in honor of CSU physics professor Frank Galeener, who died in 1992.
"I normally give this talk to a room full of physicists," Cornell said as he promised to keep the mathematical equations to a minimum. He kept his promise and used words like "fuzzy" to describe the matter and phrases that included "Box O' Cold Atoms" and "New Teckology" to relay components of the complex experiment.
The Science
Research on the Bose-Einstein matter began with physicists Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Eistein in the early 1920s. Interest in the concept picked up and rapidly expanded in the 1980s with experiments by scientists at the Massachusets Institute of Technology and other universities.
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