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Quantum Tunneling Blamed After Entire Shipment of Amazon Packages Appears Inside Neighbor's House

A physicist argues the packages overcame a classically forbidden potential barrier, which Amazon's terms of service technically do not prohibit.

2 min read
The Quantum Quandary
Quantum Tunneling Blamed After Entire Shipment of Amazon Packages Appears Inside Neighbor's House
A Riverside, California, woman is invoking quantum tunneling as the explanation for why her entire Amazon order — including a KitchenAid mixer, three novels, and a 50-pound bag of dog food — materialized inside her neighbor's locked living room on Tuesday. 'Quantum tunneling is a well-documented phenomenon in which particles pass through energy barriers they classically cannot surmount,' said Dr. Margaret Barrier of UC Riverside, whom the woman retained as an expert consultant. 'At the macroscopic scale, the probability of this occurring is astronomically small. But it is not zero. And clearly, it happened.' The neighbor, retired accountant Howard Potential, discovered the packages on his coffee table Tuesday morning. 'There was no sign of forced entry,' he told police. 'No open windows. The dog food was just sitting there, perfectly intact, as if it had simply tunneled through my wall. Which I'm told it did.' Amazon's delivery tracking system shows the packages as 'delivered' to the correct address, which the company argues fulfills its contractual obligation. 'Our delivery drivers do not violate the laws of physics,' an Amazon spokesperson said. 'The laws of physics violated themselves.' The case has drawn attention from the physics department at UC Riverside, where researchers are now monitoring the neighborhood for additional macroscopic tunneling events. 'If a 50-pound bag of dog food can tunnel through drywall, the implications for home security are profound,' said Dr. Barrier. 'Deadbolts are meaningless in a quantum universe.' Mr. Potential has installed a Faraday cage around his living room as a precaution, though physicists note this will do absolutely nothing.

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