Incidentally, think about the ramifications of storing data on light waves that can be stopped and started at the speed of light.

To get high data transfer rates in communicating information, you would love to use optical fibers. The problem is that light is extremely hard to manipulate. So we make a perfect copy of the information carried by the light. We transfer it to matter - the condensate.

There's a tremendous amount of work building the apparatus, getting the experiment to work. But sitting there late at night in the lab, and knowing light is going at bicycle speed, and that nobody in the history of mankind has ever been here before - that is mind-boggling. It's worth everything.

Physics is about questioning, studying, probing nature. You probe, and, if you're lucky, you get strange clues.

I have to think about the possible ramifications of an early retirement.

They were starting to use their speed, ... And we stopped controlling their speed.