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Summary form only given.Some recent theories offer ways to discuss the history of a tunneling particle. Surprising and experimentally testable predictions exist for whether particles spend a significant amount of time in the center of the barrier they traverse and suggest that they may occupy space on both sides of the barrier simultaneously. An approach based on Aharonov and Vaidman's weak measurement formalism implies that a particle's entire wave function has physical reality and measurable influences. The resulting complex times and their implications for optical measurements on tunneling atoms are described. Inequalities that could distinguish the expected results from a class of theories that treat the wave function as purely statistical and deny the possibility of a particle being in two places at once are looked for in parallel with experimental effort. This is the motivation for a set of laser cooling and atom …