1. Quantum physicists are beginning to sense a strange reality.
2. That it's possible for two versions of a story to happen at once.
3. That, in principle, events can occur in an indefinite causal order.
4. As in, both A causing B and B causing A can be simultaneously true.
5. The study of indefinite causality began with the physicist Lucien Hardy.
6. Through his paper, 'Probability Theories with Dynamic Causal Structure.'
7. The prospects of indefinite causality are now being observed across labs.
8. This possibility comes from a quantum phenomenon called superposition.
9. In a superposition, particles maintain all possible realities until they're measured.
10. Which is a way for physicists to go past the limitations of cause and effect thinking.
11. For it's imperative to go past causal perspectives to understand the quantum nature of things.
12. But until recently, there haven't been that many ideas about how post-causal physics might work.
13. For causal thinking has been a barrier without which coherent, meaningful theories couldn't be made.
14. But with physicists going past or reordering causal thinking, new forms of quantum experiments are on.
15. Leaping from positions of causality to superpositions is giving physicists more creative lenses to play with.
16. Which is permitting predictions without the constraints of well-defined, coherent, meaningful causal theories.
17. Einstein revoltionised physics not by thinking about what exists, but by thinking about what could possibly be.
18. With superpositions permitting simultaneous possibilities, quantum mechanics is excitingly more indeterministic.