The quantum physicists Sandu Popescu, Yakir Aharonov and Daniel Rohrlich have been troubled by the same scenario for three decades.
It started when they wrote about a surprising wave phenomenon called superoscillation in 1990. “We were never able to really tell what exactly was bothering us,” said Popescu, a professor at the University of Bristol. “Since then, every year we come back and we see it from a different angle.”
Finally, in December 2020, the trio published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explaining what the problem is: In quantum systems, superoscillation appears to violate the law of conservation of energy. This law, which states that the energy of an isolated system never changes, is more than a bedrock physical principle. It’s now understood to be an expression of the fundamental symmetries of the universe — a “very important part of the edifice of physics,” said Chiara Marletto, a physicist at the University of Oxford.
