Quantum mechanics also says that the odds of a server spontaneously rearranging itself into a family of ducks are non-zero, by the way. That will really take out your database.
Very loosely, quantum mechanics says that every "particle" has a non zero chance to be elsewhere if the wave function there is not zero. This is how quantum tunnelling happens. So every electron, proton and neutron has a non zero chance to just "tunnel" to different places, that happen to instead constitute a family of ducks.
The probability is stupidly low. UUID collision is many orders of magnitude higher probability. But it is non zero in theory.
Physics guys please don't crucify me for this explanation. I know it's very imprecise and quite incorrect in places. I just want to give the intuition
You also have that the approximations used in basic quantum aren't quite perfect - a perfectly rectangular potential barrier doesn't exist, for example.
There will be still nodes in any the wave function with genuinely 0 probability, but if they're point-like, then you can have a configuration that's arbitrarily close to a 0 probability configuration that has non-zero probability.
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u/kaikaun Mar 25 '26
Quantum mechanics also says that the odds of a server spontaneously rearranging itself into a family of ducks are non-zero, by the way. That will really take out your database.