There’s a striking link between quantum and astronomic scales. What could it mean?

While working late one night in 2017, Konstantin Batygin, a professor of planetary sciences at the California Institute of Technology, made a mathematical connection that he imagined someone else had surely found before, likely centuries ago. He had realised that the peculiar ‘washed-out wave’ behaviour of matter on the quantum scale – which disappears on the macroscopic scale (the one we can observe with our naked eye) – reemerges at the astronomical scale. As this short from Thought Café reveals, this finding turned out to have been a novel one in the history of science. Featuring some nifty animated visuals, the video has Batygin discussing the practical applications of his ‘quantum sandwich’ discovery, as well as its potentially mind-boggling implications.