In 1988, the United States Department of Energy spent $1,400,000 sending the entire 25-pound, 8,800-page environmental impact statement on the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) to 16,000 citizens who had expressed interest in the project. However, all that was required by law was to mail a summary of that statement. (source)

One of the most interesting demonstrations of the quantum mechanical nature of light is the double-slit experiment. In this experiment, light is shone through two slits on an opaque plate onto a screen. If one slit is open, the light impacts the screen with greatest intensity at the centre, fading as one moves away from the centre. One might think that, if both slits are open, the result would be the sum of the intensities from the individual slits, but what actually occurs is that an interference pattern is produced, showing that light has wave properties. Even more unusual, if you only fire one photon at the apparatus at a time (and replace the screen with a photographic plate), an interference pattern is still produced, so it would appear as if an individual photon is able to travel through both slits and interfere with itself. If you place a detector at each slit, you will observe that each photon only goes through one slit—but the pattern is now just the sum of the intensities from the individual slits, without any interference pattern.