Yu Gao

Three thousand meters above sea level, a sheer cliff face. A classical climber picks a single route and crawls up step by step, often getting stuck in a local minimum: a small niche with no upward path. A quantum climber acts differently: it can leap across a canyon and land in a neighboring energy basin where the route is better.

In its infancy, the universe was a hot, plasma-like mixture of particles. Microseconds after the Big Bang, as it cooled, the temperature fluctuated slightly.