and that's the way many of the higher-number elements were found, too

and quite a few other scientific "discoveries", which started out as abstracted postulates. Indeed®, as with the recently announced Nobel Prize for Physics:

The researchers were cited for creating a Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) and for their investigation of its fundamental properties.
The BEC was predicted in 1924 but was first created in 1995. It occurs when atoms are cooled to almost absolute zero.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/in_depth/sci_tech/newsid_1588000/1588594.stm


as for “as cold as…”, try this for a cross-thread link!

http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/bec/temperature.html