Thought of the day:

A Quantum world is to modern art as our ordinary world is to classic art. In art, the modern form is obtained by changing the rules of the classic form and introduces surprising and unexpected results. Similarly a quantum world is like our ordinary world but with the rules changed. Indeed, if we don’t observe the quantum world, then it seems anything can happen much like modern art.

The best known example of this anything-goes-until-you-measure phenomena is the wave function: a particle seems to exist in many places at the same time until you measure its position and find it located at a specific spot–the collapse of the wave function. However, does this extend to time? Can a particle exist at multiple points in time? The answer is yes! But, like the spatial case, it can’t violate the causality of classical physics upon measurement. Check out this interesting paper on the subject by Purves and Short at the university of Bristol.