How Close Can We Get to Absolute Zero with Dr. Eric Cornell

How cold is the world’s coldest stuff? Eric Cornell describes how he created the world’s first Bose-Einstein condensate, with a temperature measuring just a few billionths of a degree, or a few nanokelvins, above absolute zero. To put this temperature in perspective, room temperature is around 300 degrees Kelvin, water freezes at 273 degrees Kelvin, and helium turns from a gas into a liquid at 4 degrees Kelvin. The Bose-Einstein condensate was much colder than that, by a factor of more than a million!