Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman, at the JILA institute at the University of Colorado, succeed in 1995 in creating the first Bose-Einstein condensate in history: a state of matter theoretically predicted by Albert Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose in 1924-25, in which a collection of atoms cooled to extraordinarily low temperatures — millionths of a degree above absolute zero — loses its individual identity and behaves as a single coherent quantum entity, with all atoms simultaneously occupying the same fundamental quantum state. Cornell and Wieman combine the laser-cooling techniques developed by Chu, Cohen-Tannoudji, and Phillips with additional evaporative cooling to reach temperatures of just 170 nanokelvin above absolute zero, achieving condensation of rubidium atoms. Wolfgang Ketterle, at MIT, independently achieves a denser condensate months later using sodium atoms, and develops techniques to study its properties in greater detail, including observing quantum interference patterns between two distinct condensates — direct demonstration of the coherent wave nature of matter at macroscopic scale. The achievement, pursued unsuccessfully for seventy years since the original theoretical prediction, opens an entire field of research into ultracold-matter physics, with applications in precision metrology, quantum simulation, and the first developments of a new generation of atomic clocks.