Who came first, the chicken or the egg? Quantum physics says

Quantum physics has an answer to the age-old riddle: who came first, the chicken or the egg? Maybe both

The philosophical dilemma posed in ancient Greece led biologists to think of eggs. But Australian and French physicists examine the puzzle differently, using it to explain their findings on how events unfold on smaller scales.

"The strangeness of quantum mechanics means that events can happen in no particular order," said Jacqui Romero, a researcher at the University of Queensland, in a statement.

Take a daily commute, she said, in which a person jumps on a train before taking the bus to get to the office. The train ride must take place first, then the bus. It is the established order. This is not the case in quantum physics, said Romero.

"In our experience, these two events can happen first," she said. "This is called" indefinite causal order "and it's not something we can observe in our daily lives."

By observing the "two" of indefinite causal order, the researchers had to use a device called a photonic quantum switch, the university being detailed in a statement. From there, tinkering with photons revealed that particle properties were even stranger than previously thought.

As Adrian Cho of Science magazine explains, researchers have discovered that "it may be impossible to tell in what order occur two events, erasing our sense of common sense before and after and potentially, scrambling the concept of causality ".

And quantum physics has blurred things before: electrons, for example, have been shown to be able to exist in two places at once. In the same way, the magazine reports that a diagonally polarized photon can act in two ways at a time, with both events occurring first.

Fabio Costa, a researcher at the University of Queensland on the study, said the findings could be extrapolated to efforts other than the chicken or egg theory.

"It is only a first proof of principle," said Costa in his statement, "but on a larger scale, an indefinite causal order may have real practical applications, such as making computers more effective or improve communication. "

Research from the University of Queensland and the NEEL Institute team was published last week in "Physical Reviews Letters".

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