Classical physics, the body of physics developed until about the turn of the 20th century, cannot account for the behavior of matter and light at extremely small scales. The branch of physics concerned with atomic and subatomic systems is known as quantum mechanics. Its aim is to account for the properties of molecules and atoms and their even tinier constituents, such as electrons, protons, neutrons, and quarks. Quantum mechanics describes how these particles interact with each other and with light, X-rays, gamma rays, and other forms of electromagnetic radiation.
One of the great ideas of the 20th century, quantum mechanics continues to be at the forefront of advances in physics in the 21st century. In addition to explaining the structure of atoms and the behavior of subatomic particles, it has explained the nature of chemical bonds, the properties of crystalline solids, nuclear energy, and the forces that stabilize collapsed stars. Quantum theory also led directly to the invention of the laser, the electron microscope, and the transistor.
Quantum mechanics has revealed that matter and radiation behave much differently at extremely small scales than at the larger, familiar scales of the everyday world—the world described by classical physics. At atomic scales the behavior of matter and radiation can seem unusual or downright bizarre. The concepts of quantum mechanics often conflict with common-sense notions, notions that have of course been developed through observations of the world at larger scales. Danish physicist Niels Bohr famously said that “anybody who is not shocked by this subject has failed to understand it.”
While the laws of classical physics allow one to determine exactly how matter and radiation will behave, quantum mechanics deals only in probabilities. Indeterminacy—randomness or uncertainty—is fundamental to quantum mechanics. Nevertheless, the success of this field is indisputable. Using probabilities, quantum mechanics makes very precise predictions about the properties of atomic and subatomic systems. In experiments these predictions have been shown to be extraordinarily accurate—more accurate in fact than those of any other branch of physics.
In the 1800s physicists had discovered that light behaves like a wave. The German physicist Max Planck proposed the revolutionary quantum theory of light in 1900, in what he called an “act of desperation,” to account for certain mysterious facts about the emission of light. He proposed that, rather than being emitted continuously, light can be given off only in tiny bundles, or certain specific amounts of energy, which he called quanta (singular, quantum). Albert Einstein used this quantum theory to explain the photoelectric effect in 1905, proposing that in some ways light behaves like a particle. In the 1920s Louis-Victor de Broglie extended this idea to matter, proposing that electrons and other “particles” can behave like a wave. This has been confirmed in experiments. Radiation and matter sometimes have characteristics of waves and sometimes have characteristics of particles; they cannot be said to be one or the other.
Among the most important developers of quantum mechanics were Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Born, and Werner Heisenberg. In 1913 Bohr used the quantum theory to develop a new model of the structure of atoms. In 1926 Schrödinger developed the fundamental mathematical equation of quantum mechanics. It is radically different from Isaac Newton’s laws of motion, which are fundamental to classical physics, in that it indicates only probabilities. The solutions to the Schrödinger equation are wave functions, and Born showed that these functions can indicate the likelihood that a certain particle will be in a given place at a given time. According to Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle of 1927, it is impossible to measure both the exact position of a particle and its exact velocity at a given moment—even in theory. The more accurately one measures the position, the less accurately one can measure the velocity, and vice versa. The concepts of exact position and exact velocity together, in fact, have no meaning in nature.
