I recall when the race was on to see who could produce a Bose Einstein condensate first. MIT was in the running with CU Bolder and Princeton, IIRC. I was of course cheering for CU as I went there. The fact that all the atoms in the condensate tend to spread out and overlap each other making them look like one super atom had been theorized for decades. What was also cool about a Bose Einstein condensate is that laser light entering it would slow down so much that a relatively long period of time would elapse before you would see the beam exit.