The 2000 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Engineering presented to Carl Wieman, Eric Cornell and Wolfgang Ketterle

The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, awarded the 2000 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Engineering to Carl Wieman, Eric Cornell, and Wolfgang Ketterle for their epoch-making experimental confirmation of the 1925 prediction by Satyendra Bose and Albert Einstein, who claimed on theoretical grounds that a dilute gas can condense into a large quantum–mechanical system and display properties that are usually found only on an atomic or molecular scale.