Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein is perhaps the most famous physicist of all time. He had a hand in so many crucial theories developed during the 20th century – relativity, quantum mechanics, the big bang theory, Brownian motion – that there seems to be no field of physics where he didn’t make a mark. He certainly had an effect on low-temperature physics. He was the person who first described what a gas would look like if taken down to cold temperatures so extreme that they nearly reached absolute zero.

Einstein was born at Ulm, in Württemberg, Germany, on March 14, 1879. He attended the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich and obtained his degree in 1901. Although Einstein was trained as a teacher, he was unable to find a position and instead worked as a technical assistant with the Swiss Patent Office.

In the early 1920s the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose described a sest of rules for deciding when two photons (particles of light) should be counted as either identical or different. Einstein used his influence to get Bose’s ideas published, and later decided to take the work in a different direction. Einstein applied the same rules to atoms in a gas. The equations turned out to get interesting at very low temperatures -- if the atoms were cold enough, the atoms would all begin to move in perfect synch. Normally atoms in a gas move about in every direction, but near absolute zero, a group of atoms will move in lock step as it they are a single entity. Einstein’s name will always be linked to this theory, because the group of atoms is called a Bose-Einstein condensate.

In the 1980s and 1990s, many low-temperature physicists wanted to create matter close enough to absolute zero to see a BEC – and they finally achieved it in 1995.