![]() ![]() ![]() : 102–111 : 1.1–1.8 The wave nature of light causes the light waves passing through the two slits to interfere, producing bright and dark bands on the screen – a result that would not be expected if light consisted of classical particles. In the basic version of this experiment, a coherent light source, such as a laser beam, illuminates a plate pierced by two parallel slits, and the light passing through the slits is observed on a screen behind the plate. The most famous form of this uncertainty principle says that no matter how a quantum particle is prepared or how carefully experiments upon it are arranged, it is impossible to have a precise prediction for a measurement of its position and also at the same time for a measurement of its momentum.Īnother consequence of the mathematical rules of quantum mechanics is the phenomenon of quantum interference, which is often illustrated with the double-slit experiment. One consequence of the mathematical rules of quantum mechanics is a tradeoff in predictability between different measurable quantities. The Schrödinger equation relates the collection of probability amplitudes that pertain to one moment of time to the collection of probability amplitudes that pertain to another. This is the best the theory can do it cannot say for certain where the electron will be found. Applying the Born rule to these amplitudes gives a probability density function for the position that the electron will be found to have when an experiment is performed to measure it. For example, a quantum particle like an electron can be described by a wave function, which associates to each point in space a probability amplitude. This is known as the Born rule, named after physicist Max Born. Mathematically, a probability is found by taking the square of the absolute value of a complex number, known as a probability amplitude. Ī fundamental feature of the theory is that it usually cannot predict with certainty what will happen, but only give probabilities. Predictions of quantum mechanics have been verified experimentally to an extremely high degree of accuracy. It has been demonstrated to hold for complex molecules with thousands of atoms, but its application to human beings raises philosophical problems, such as Wigner's friend, and its application to the universe as a whole remains speculative. It is typically applied to microscopic systems: molecules, atoms and sub-atomic particles. Quantum mechanics allows the calculation of properties and behaviour of physical systems. In one of them, a mathematical entity called the wave function provides information, in the form of probability amplitudes, about what measurements of a particle's energy, momentum, and other physical properties may yield. The modern theory is formulated in various specially developed mathematical formalisms. These early attempts to understand microscopic phenomena, now known as the " old quantum theory", led to the full development of quantum mechanics in the mid-1920s by Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, Paul Dirac and others. Quantum mechanics arose gradually from theories to explain observations that could not be reconciled with classical physics, such as Max Planck's solution in 1900 to the black-body radiation problem, and the correspondence between energy and frequency in Albert Einstein's 1905 paper, which explained the photoelectric effect. Quantum mechanics differs from classical physics in that energy, momentum, angular momentum, and other quantities of a bound system are restricted to discrete values ( quantization) objects have characteristics of both particles and waves ( wave–particle duality) and there are limits to how accurately the value of a physical quantity can be predicted prior to its measurement, given a complete set of initial conditions (the uncertainty principle). Most theories in classical physics can be derived from quantum mechanics as an approximation valid at large (macroscopic) scale. : 1.1 It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, quantum field theory, quantum technology, and quantum information science.Ĭlassical physics, the collection of theories that existed before the advent of quantum mechanics, describes many aspects of nature at an ordinary ( macroscopic) scale, but is not sufficient for describing them at small (atomic and subatomic) scales. Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. ![]()
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