  Virtually all known fluorophores, including semiconductor nanoparticles,
nanorods and nanowires exhibit unexplainable episodes of intermittent emission
blinking. A most remarkable feature of the fluorescence intermittency is a
universal power law distribution of on- and off-times. For nanoparticles the
resulting power law extends over an extraordinarily wide dynamic range: nine
orders of magnitude in probability density and five to six orders of magnitude
in time. The exponents hover about the ubiquitous value of -3/2. Dark states
routinely last for tens of seconds, which are practically forever on quantum
mechanical time scales. Despite such infinite states of darkness, the dots
miraculously recover and start emitting again. Although the underlying
mechanism responsible for this phenomenon remains an enduring mystery and many
questions remain, we argue that substantial theoretical progress has been made.
