For three decades, quantum physicists Sandu Popescu, Yakir Aharonov and Daniel Rohrlich have been plagued by the same scenario. This started with a wave phenomenon they described in 1990 called superoscillation. “We’ve never been able to really say what the trouble is,” said University of Bristol professor Popescu. “We’ve come back here every year since then and seen it from a different perspective.”
In December 2020, three physicists published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explaining the problem: In quantum systems, superoscillations appear to violate the law of conservation of energy . The law states that the energy of an isolated system never changes, and it’s not just a basic physical principle. It is now thought to be an expression of the fundamental symmetry of the universe – “a very important part of the edifice of physics”, says Chiara Marletto, a physicist at the University of Oxford. Physicists are divided over whether the new paradox actually violates the law of conservation of energy. Their approach to the question depends in part on whether individual experimental results of quantum mechanics should be taken seriously—no matter how improbable they may be. The hope is that by working to solve this conundrum, researchers will be able to figure out some of the subtlest and strangest parts of quantum theory.
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