Ever since Austrian scientist Erwin Schrodinger put his
unfortunate cat in a box, his fellow physicists have been using something
called quantum theory to explain and understand the nature of waves and
particles.
But a new paper by physics professor Andreas Albrecht and
graduate student Dan Phillips at the University of California, Davis, makes the
case that these quantum fluctuations actually are responsible for the
probability of all actions, with far-reaching implications for theories of the
universe.
Quantum theory is a branch of theoretical physics that
strives to understand and predict the properties and behavior of atoms and
particles. Without it, we would not be able to build transistors and computers,
for example. One aspect of the theory is that the precise properties of a
particle are not determined until you observe them and "collapse the wave
function" in physics parlance.