Electrons zipping through transistors, powering the screens on our smartphones. Light zooming from distant stars to Earth, moving faster than anything else in the universe. Protons enabling MRI machines to analyze people’s injuries.

Quantum mechanics explains the behavior of subatomic particles like electrons, photons and protons. In contrast to classical physics that we can observe with our senses, particles in the quantum realm have unusual behaviors. Even though quantum particles make common technologies possible, we don’t experience these behaviors in our everyday world.

That’s why a discovery in 1985 was such a big deal. In a laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, a team of three scientists showed that a system you could see could demonstrate quantum behavior. Or as they said in one of the journal articles covering the experiments, the system was “big enough to get one’s grubby fingers on.”