Despite physicists’ fascination with the weird behavior of materials at extremely low temperatures — 11 Nobel Prizes have been awarded in the area — a unified explanation of materials like superfluids and Bose-Einstein condensates remained elusive. Now, physicists have demonstrated that counting the number of Nambu-Goldstone bosons in a material reveals the material’s behavior at low temperatures, allowing the prediction of behavior and design of new materials with spooky properties.