


It wasn’t until 1962 that a semiconductor engineer at Texas Instruments named Thomas Hartman wrote a paper that explicitly embraced the shocking implications of the math.

Even earlier stabs might have been made in private, but “when you get an answer you can’t make sense of, you don’t publish it,” noted Aephraim Steinberg, a physicist at the University of Toronto. The first tentative calculation of tunneling time appeared in print in 1932. The trouble was that the answer didn’t make sense.
