Carl E. Wieman held his Nobel Lecture December 8, 2001, at Aula Magna, Stockholm University. He was presented by Professor Mats Jonson, Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics.

Summary: Einstein predicted Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) in 1925, and Wieman outlines the background of BEC and the general framework of the experiments that allowed BEC to be created in a gas. BEC does not occur in nature because temperatures are not low enough. Techniques to achieve BEC include laser cooling and magnetic trapping. The early results achieved around 1995 were based on 1,000 – 100,000 atoms in the transition to BEC. Second-generation experiments contain millions of atoms.