Making Molecular Magic Matter
It’s impossible to imagine what passes as small talk for a guy like Wolfgang Ketterle. Then again, almost everything he works on at his MIT physics lab is small--molecules, electrons, the tiniest components of matter.
These are things most of us nonscientists don’t quite understand. But a recent ad in the paper invited everyone to at least try to comprehend recent advances in physics, by attending a talk at which Ketterle would discuss the work for which he won the 2001 Nobel Prize.
So we show up at UCLA’s Young Hall (along with about 150 others, mostly students and faculty) for the visiting professor’s afternoon lecture: “Gaseous Bose-Einstein condensates--a nanokelvin laboratory for quantum physics.”
The frisson of Ketterle’s brilliance washes over us as he waves his arms, aims his laser pointer at slides on a screen and explains the behavior of ultra-cold atoms in a vacuum chamber. Or something.
Tall, wiry and attractively Teutonic, the German-born scientist, 43, has his audience enthralled with tales of how he and his MIT team won Nobel gold for what the prize committee described as having “caused atoms to sing in unison,” thereby discovering a new state of matter.
The idea of atoms singing is itself appealing--perhaps a concept Nickelodeon might work on. Equally appealing are the handwritten notes Ketterle has projected onto the screen. “It was the night of Sept. 30, at about 11:30 p.m.,” he tells the audience, “and we observed for the very first time a sudden crispness in the image on the computer monitors. We got very excited.”
At 4 in the morning, his notes show, team members became even more excited. A single exclamation point emphasizes the fact that Bose-Einstein condensation has actually taken place.
In the audience, at the mention of that moment, there is a certain shiver. And Ketterle reminds his listeners that most great science seems to take place between midnight and 6 a.m.--a fact his wife and three children are probably all too aware of.
But what does it all mean?
We phoned UCLA physics professor Joseph Rudnick to find out. It turns out Rudnick was the one who’d placed the ad in the paper, thinking that science buffs around the city might want to attend this lecture that “would knock their socks off.”
“What he won the prize for is the magic he does with collections of atoms, electrons, molecules. Up to now we’ve had only indirect evidence for how they behaved, we could imagine what things looked like at that level of very small particles,” Rudnick says.
“But he’s a magician--a guy who knows how to grab hold of atoms, play with them, move them individually and in groups from place to place, jiggle them around like a kid with a handful of marbles. Just the idea that he can hold an atom in place, then take more atoms and put them next to it ... it really is like magic.”
Bose-Einstein condensation is something every physics graduate student knows all about, Rudnick adds, even if the rest of us don’t. But for 70 years, scientists had tried to achieve it and couldn’t. Not until 1995, when Ketterle and two others--all working independently--finally achieved the goal of BEC. The three won the Nobel Prize for physics last year for their breakthroughs.
“We don’t know where it will lead,” Rudnick says. “This is wild speculation, but there is a possibility that Ketterle’s work will lead to development of really, really, really small devices, which would alter the nature of all activity in the world.”
Something all of us can think about in the middle of the night.
