![]() ![]() The wave view did not immediately displace the ray and particle view, but began to dominate scientific thinking about light in the mid 19th century, since it could explain polarization phenomena that the alternatives could not. The resulting Huygens–Fresnel principle was extremely successful at reproducing light's behaviour and was consistent with Thomas Young's discovery of wave interference of light by his double-slit experiment in 1801. Around the same time, Newton's contemporaries Robert Hooke and Christiaan Huygens, and later Augustin-Jean Fresnel, mathematically refined the wave viewpoint, showing that if light traveled at different speeds in different media, refraction could be easily explained as the medium-dependent propagation of light waves. : 19 He explained refraction by positing that particles of light accelerated laterally upon entering a denser medium. The discoveries of the 19th century, both the successes and failures, set the stage for the emergence of quantum mechanics.īeginning in 1670 and progressing over three decades, Isaac Newton developed and championed his corpuscular theory, arguing that the perfectly straight lines of reflection demonstrated light's particle nature, as at that time no wave theory demonstrated travel in straight lines. Triumph and trouble at the end of the classical era So, quantum mechanics is the part of mechanics that deals with objects for which particular properties are quantized. Mechanics is the branch of science that deals with the action of forces on objects. For example, in most countries, money is effectively quantized, with the quantum of money being the lowest-value coin in circulation. Something that is quantized, as the energy of Planck's harmonic oscillators, can only take specific values. The word quantum comes from the Latin word for "how much" (as does quantity). The phrase "quantum mechanics" was coined (in German, Quantenmechanik) by the group of physicists including Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, and Wolfgang Pauli, at the University of Göttingen in the early 1920s, and was first used in Born's 1925 paper "Zur Quantenmechanik". The history of quantum chemistry, theoretical basis of chemical structure, reactivity, and bonding, interlaces with the events discussed in this article. The history of quantum mechanics continues in the history of quantum field theory. Paul Dirac's relativistic quantum theory work lead him to explore quantum theories of radiation, culminating in quantum electrodynamics, the first quantum field theory. Building on the technology developed in classical mechanics, the invention of wave mechanics by Erwin Schrödinger and expansion by many others triggers the "modern" era beginning around 1925. The major chapters of this history begin with the emergence of quantum ideas to explain individual phenomena-blackbody radiation, the photoelectric effect, solar emission spectra-an era called the Old or Older quantum theories. The history of quantum mechanics is a fundamental part of the history of modern physics. Left to right: Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrödinger, Richard Feynman. See also: Timeline of quantum mechanics, History of physics, and History of quantum field theory 10 of the most influential figures in the history of quantum mechanics.
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