The toughest problems will be solved with a roll of the dice

摘要

Physicists hope to use subatomic particles' imprecise nature to answer questions beyond the reach of today's computers. Electrons would make terrible golf balls. They're just too ill-be-Ihaved. When an ordinary golf ball rolls across the green and comes to a stop, it's either in the hole or it's not. An electron, on the other hand, can be in many places at once-in the hole, beside it, and at the edge of the green. Like all submicroscopic particles, an electron tends to spread itself out in a sort of hazy "cloud" of probability. It's impossible to keep track of where it is at every moment. With quantum mechanics, we can work out the probability that an electron is in a given spot, but the electron won't settle on a single location until something forces it to.