PASADENA, CA—Upending the conventionally held assumption that the United States must exclusively be moving along a single good or bad path forward, quantum political scientists at the California Institute of Technology published a paper Thursday hypothesizing that the country is, in fact, headed in both the right and wrong directions simultaneously. “Rather than inhabiting a single reality where the nation’s future looks bright or an opposite one where Americans are struggling like never before, our research suggests that these two conditions actually exist concurrently in a state of superposition,” said lead researcher David Rimbaud, adding that, according to their analysis of quantum wave function and Gallup polls, the nation’s best days were found to lie, paradoxically, both ahead of and behind it. “In addition, our research has revealed for the first time that this country is currently changing beyond all recognition while at the same time remaining the same as it’s always been. Similarly, the United States was found to be both a beacon of freedom and hope in the world and an antagonist to those very same hopes and freedoms. Though seemingly contradictory, all of these scenarios are equally true.” Rimbaud added that in both divergent realities, China was still the world’s dominant economic force.