Quote:
Originally Posted by Eta C
Well, it's Nobel season again so it's time for the third annual exercise in thread necromancy that 01101001 and I have been engaged in. So Jerry, here we are in 2009 and Wolfgang Ketterle still has his Nobel Prize. Any new evidence, or are you willing to concede on this one and admit that his work on Bose-Einstein condensates is valid?
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I've never had a hard opinion about Ketterle's work. It is the very first claim, by Cornell and Wieman that I strongly question. The apparatus was too new, the pressures too great, and the results were
too perfect. To the best of my knowledge, no one has duplicated their work (using the same materials) and producing anywhere near such a picture-perfect signal of a Bose Einstein hole. Ketterle's data is much more iffy, if you will - as is every BE paper I have read since. If the Cornell/Wieman apparatus worked so well, why hasn't anyone followed their lead?
See
http://cua.mit.edu/ketterle_group/Th...bellthesis.pdf
This is a thesis based upon work in the MIT 'rubidium' laboratory, and constrast the results with the widely published Cornell image obtained ~seven years earlier. FWIW, I'm not convinced that a new state of matter is necessary to obtain the interference patterns observed. (Not that I am opposed to BE condensates; but I am extremely skeptical of Einstein's primary product: General relativity. It is failing miserably this century, and we have to do better.)