The Universe is Procrastinating

Mission 1: Enter the Quantum World. Part of the Quantum Courier Service, a free course from the Oxford University Quantum Information Society.

The Universe is Procrastinating: this isn't a secret the coin is hiding from you. The universe itself has not made a decision yet. What exists in the meantime isn't a probability. It's something stranger, called an amplitude, and the difference is the reason any of this is interesting. Probabilities can only pile up. Amplitudes can cancel each other out. Square an amplitude and you get the odds you'll actually see; but until you square it, the universe is doing arithmetic that has a minus sign in it, and no coin has ever managed that.