When magazines pay people to write articles like these about quantum mechanics, I wish they’d find people who know what they were talking about. That article is total, utter, worthless crap and you emerge from reading it less knowledgeable than you were before.

Read here for more information about the actual result.

In short, what the paper actually succeeded in doing was measuring and “observing” a quantum state transition occurring, which had never been done before. However, that such a state transition is not instantaneous and takes time is a standard part of QM, is nothing new had been known for 50+ years. This is just the first time it’d ever been measured and reversed.

Quantum trajectory theory does NOT makes predictions that are impossible to make with the standard formulation, contrary to what the Yale researcher claimed in the Quanta piece. Why a scientist claimed this, I have no idea. But nevertheless, he is 100% wrong. Perhaps he was misquoted.

The researchers did achieve something and that is notable. But they did not achieve what the Quanta article claimed, nor is the researcher correct about what exactly they discovered.

Also, that quantum state transitions are predictable once they start occurring has also been known for 50+ years — and that’s because the Schrödinger equation itself is completely deterministic. What is random and always will be is when and where a quantum transition will start — in other words, a specific uranium atom cannot ever be predicted to emit a photon, but when it starts to transition, we can predict its states and how long it will take.

As I said, the researchers did achieve something quite cool and that had never been done before. However, they did not discover anything new at all about QM and this changes that theory in no way at all. Quantum energy state transitions have always been deterministic once they start and have always been known to take time.