  Recent technological advances have enabled to isolate, control and measure
the properties of a single atom, leading to the possibility to perform
statistics on the behavior of single quantum systems. These experiments have
enabled to check a question which was out of reach previously: Is the
statistics of a repeatedly excitation of an atom N times equivalent to a single
excitation of an ensemble of N atoms? We present a new method to analyze
quantum measurements which leads to the postulation that the answer is most
probably no. We discuss the merits of the analysis and its conclusion.
