Quantum Mechanics

Quantum Mechanics is the science of subatomic particles and their behavior patterns that are observed in nature. As the foundation of scientific knowledge approached the start of the twentieth century, problems began to arise over the fact that classic physical ideas were not capable of explaining the observed behavior of subatomic particles. In 1913, the Danish physicist Neils Bohr, proposed a successful quantum model of the atom that began the process of a more defined understanding of its subatomic particles. It was accepted in the early part of the twentieth century that light traveled as both waves and particles. The reason light appears to act as a wave and particle is because we are noticing the accumulation of many light particles distributed over the probabilities of where each particle could be. In 1923, Louis De Broglie hypothesized that subatomic particles exhibit wavelike and particle properties for the same reason. The success of these theories inspired physicists to developed a way to describe the behavior of subatomic phenomena in terms of both waves and particles by means of mathematics.

Newton’s laws, the basis of classic physical ideas, help obtain precise information about the location of an object at any future time. Classical physics assumes all collisions and locations of particles can be measured at once. The dual wave-particle nature of electrons flew in the face of such beliefs. In a changing environment, as is the nature of the electron, classical physical attributes of position and momentum are fleeting phenomena. No atomic particle can have both of these properties at the same time. An electron cannot be observed without changing its state. The simultaneous measurement of two conjugate variables such as the momentum and position or the energy and time for a moving particle entails a limitation on the precision of each measurement. This observance is what Werner Heisenberg refereed to as the principle of uncertainty, which commonly became known as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. We have the illusion that position and momentum can co-exist in large objects whose inherent action is huge compared to subatomic particles.

Heisenberg realized that the uncertainty relations had profound implications. Heisenberg set himself to the task of finding the new quantum mechanics to explain what his theories observed. He relied on what can be observed, namely the light emitted and absorbed by the atoms. By July 1925, Heisenberg wrote his answer in a paper. The basic idea of Heisenberg's paper was to get rid of the orbits in atoms and to arrive at new mechanical equations. Heisenberg’s approached focused mainly on the particle nature of electrons. The mathematics Heisenberg used were tables commonly used for multiplication of arrays of numbers-mathematical objects known as matrices. Using the mathematics of matrices, scientists had at last a new mechanics for calculating the quantum behavior of particles.