A single atom, wandering down a path in a laboratory, encounters a fork where it can go left or right. We are creatures of habit, monotonously persisting in just one location at a time. Like most epic heroes, atoms have some problems that ordinary humans don’t. They have witnessed the entire history of life on our planet. They have bathed in the light of a violent young sun. Your house keys are a temporary alliance of a trillion trillion atoms, each forged in a dying star eons ago, each falling to Earth in its earliest days. Yet these mundane things are composed of a galaxy of the unfamiliar. This isn’t surprising-these objects have no uncharted abilities or virtues. Leave your keys in your jacket, and they won’t also be on the hook by the front door. The objects in our everyday lives have an annoying inability to appear in two places at once.
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