Ari Dyckovsky was 15 when a Bose-Einstein condensate hit him right between the eyes. It didn’t really hit him between the eyes. That’s just a metaphor. But metaphors are thoroughly appropriate when you’re discussing a trip from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., into that alternate universe known as quantum mechanics.

When he was 15, Dyckovsky sat down to watch a PBS documentary that culminated with a group of physicists creating a new form of matter called the Bose-Einstein condensate, or BEC.

First predicted in the 1920s by Albert Einstein and an Indian scientist named Satyendra Bose, BEC isn’t a solid or a liquid or a gas. It’s not even a plasma. Existing only at extremely low temperatures, where it exhibits the seemingly magical properties of quantum mechanics, BEC is something different — a group of atoms that act like a single super atom, particles that behave like waves.