Abstract William Phillips of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland, shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics for his work in developing laser methods for cooling and trapping atoms. Interactions between the light field and the atoms create what is dubbed an ‘optical molasses’ that slows the atoms down, thereby reducing their temperature to within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero. These techniques allow atoms to be studied with great precision, for example measuring their resonant frequencies for light absorption very accurately, so that these frequencies may supply very stable timing standards for atomic clocks. Besides applications in metrology, such cooling methods can also be used to study new fundamental physics. The 1997 Nobel award was widely considered to be a response to the first observation in 1995 of pure Bose–Einstein condensation (BEC), in which a collection of bosonic atoms all occupy a single quantum state. This quantum-mechanical effect only becomes possible at very low temperatures, and the team that achieved it, working at JILA operated jointly by the University of Colorado and NIST, used the techniques devised by Phillips and others. Since then, cold-atom physics has branched in many directions, among them being attempts to make a quantum computer (which would use logic operations based on quantum rules) from ultracold trapped atoms and ions. ‘National Science Review’ spoke with Phillips about the development and future potential of the field.