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It all started with tiny quantum flickers on the primal canvas. Inflation — an avalanche-like expansion proposed by Alan Guth — stretched those brushstrokes to the scale of galaxies. For a long time, it was thought the paint had dried: interaction with the cosmological horizon (the boundary of the visible universe) erases quantum fuzziness and builds up entropy (a measure of disorder). The picture became classical and predictable.

But a fresh hypothesis allows that the brushstrokes may never have fully set — a relic quantum blurriness might have survived. To catch it, Andrei Linde and other theorists, including Stephen Hawking, turn to the Wigner function — a sensitive scanner that spots where the paint is still wet. Surprise twist: this tool, invented in 1932 for single particles, can yield negative values — nonsense for an ordinary snapshot, but a sure sign of lingering quantumness.