  In the 5th century B.C.,the philosopher and logician Zeno of Elea posed
several paradoxes which remained unresolved for over two thousand five hundred
years. The $20^{th}$ century saw some resolutions to Zeno's mind boggling
problems. This long journey saw many significant milestones in the form of
discoveries like the tools of converging series and theories on infinite sets
in mathematics. In recent times, the Zeno effect made an intriguing appearance
in a rather unlikely place - a situation involving the time evolution of a
quantum system, which is subject to "observations" over a period of time.
Leonid Khalfin working in the former USSR in the 1960s and ECG Sudarshan and B.
Misra at the University of Texas, Austin, first drew attention to this problem.
In 1977, ECG Sudarshan and B. Misra published a paper on the quantum Zeno
effect, called "The Zeno's paradox in quantum theory". Their fascinating result
revealed the bizarre workings of the quantum world. Misra and Sudarshan's 1977
paper activated over two decades of theoretical and experimental explorations
into the subject and still continues to evoke a lot of interest. In the
following, the quantum Zeno effect is described and a brief outline of some of
the work following Misra and Sudarshan's paper is given. The quantum Zeno
effect is yet another example of the myriad unimaginable possibilities that lie
waiting in the magical world of the quantum.
