Original Einstein manuscript found

This is very cool:  the original manuscript of a paper Einstein published in 1925, entitled "Quantum theory of the monatomic ideal gas," detailing one of the physicist's last great breakthroughs, has been discovered "in the archives of Leiden University's Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics."

"It was quite exciting" when a student working on his master's thesis uncovered the delicate manuscript written in Einstein's distinctive scrawl, said professor Carlo Beenakker. "You can even see Einstein's fingerprints in some places, and it's full of notes and markups from his editor."

...

The paper predicted that at temperatures near absolute zero — around 460 degrees below zero — particles in a gas can reach a state of such low energy that they clump together in one larger "mono-atom."

More precisely, many of these atoms assume the lowest possible quantum energy state possible in this container.  "The atoms' physical properties, such as their motions, became identical to one another. This Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), the first observed in a gas, can be thought of as the matter counterpart of the laser-except that in the condensate it is atoms, rather than photons, that dance in perfect unison."

The idea was developed in collaboration with Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose and the then-theoretical state of matter was dubbed a Bose-Einstein condensation.

(Hat tip to Searchlight Crusade for the link.)