Like most epic heroes, atoms have some problems that ordinary humans don’t. We are creatures of habit, monotonously persisting in just one location at a time. But atoms are prone to whimsy. A single atom, wandering down a path in a laboratory, encounters a fork where it can go left or right. Rather than choosing one way forward, as you or I would have to do, the atom suffers a crisis of indecision over where to be and where not to be. Ultimately, our nanometer Hamlet chooses both. The atom doesn’t split, it doesn’t take one path and then the other—it travels down both paths, simultaneously,
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