The nature of time is one of the most intriguing questions in modern physics and philosophy. One of the reasons why is that the world we observe (often referred to as classical) differs from what really exists on very small scales - the weird, surprising world of quantum physics. Recently, a team of researchers from Sweden, Spain, and Germany designed a clever experiment to watch how quantum systems become classical systems - and in the process, found that time is not as precise as we thought it was.

At its most fundamental level, time is fuzzy.

Lets pretend that your car is acting like an electron. When you look down at your speedometer, instead of having one needle pointing to 40 miles per hour, you would have a highlighted bar letting you know your car was going somewhere between 20 and 60 miles per hour. When you look up, you wouldnt even know what lane you were in.

That would all change when a police officer points her radar gun at you and measures you to be going precisely 40 miles an hour in the right-hand lane.

This is how reality works on very very small scales. Particles like electrons are not in any one position with any one energy. Instead, they are simultaneously in many positions with many energies at once - something called a superposition. This is the case until something - or someone - observes that tiny electron. At that moment, the electron picks a state to be in, illustrating that the observer is a fundamental part of this universe.

The authors of the paper, appearing in Physical Review Letters, wanted to see an electron in the act of making up its mind. They took small snapshots of a strontium ion in an electric field. The electrons within these ions at first were still in their quantum state - and their reality was a smudging of probabilities of various orbital states.

Electrons in orbit around an atom aren't in any one state until they are measured.

The scientists then made their observation by poking the atom with a laser, forcing the electrons to decide what orbit they would occupy.

The scientists found it took the electrons some time to make up their minds.

By taking photographs to see what happens in that one-millionth of a second, scientists saw that the decision, a process referred to as wave function collapse, took some time to happen. Its like when the police officer points her radar gun at you - your car is first going somewhere between 20 and 60 miles an hour, then between 35 and 50, then either 40, 42, or 45, then finally deciding it is going 40 miles an hour.

The intriguing results show that quantum collapse is not instantaneous. It also shows us how time operates on the quantum level - and shows us that time itself may be a blurry, abstract concept. It also shows us that our concept of now may not really exist, and that our reality is a very weird place indeed.

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Scientists Measured An Exact Moment In Quantum Time - And It Was Fuzzy - Forbes