First there was Schrödinger's cat, now an international team of physicists has come up with a new animal-related paradox involving "quantum pigeons".
For nearly a century students have struggled to understand the many counter-intuitive implications of quantum physics. Perhaps the most famous paradox is Schrödinger's cat, whereby a cat being both dead and alive at the same time illustrates the fact that a particle can exist simultaneously in two quantum states.
Now, Jeff Tollaksen of Chapman University in California and colleagues in Israel, Italy and the UK have proposed an equally bizarre scenario dubbed the "quantum-pigeonhole effect". The paradox begins with the observation that when you put three pigeons in two pigeonholes, there will always be at least two pigeons in the same hole. But according to the team's quantum analysis, it is possible for none of the pigeons to share a hole.
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