At the end of the 19th century, it seemed that we had the physics of how things move all figured out. But then, with advancements in technology, scientists begin to find that classical physics could not explain the way the behavior of matter in certain situations. While classical physics explained and predicted situations on the human scale perfectly, when scientists performed experiements on a very tiny or very massive scale or studied matter that was moving at really high velocities, classical physics simply did not explain the empirical results of each experiment.
Scientist Niels Bohr quickly began to realize that minute sub-atomic particles such as atoms and photons behave in totally different from what classical physics would predict. In certain experiments, it was proved that atoms could cross from one side of a solid piece of material to another. It was also discovered that energy could convert into matter and vise versa. These discoveries astounded common sense and reason. Bohr coined the term “quantum mechanics” in 1924, and wrote about his findings, “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory does not understand it.” The wider group of physicists around Bohr quickly accepted quantum mechanics because of its ability to accurate predict how sub-atomic particles will behave when Newtonian mechanics fails to describe the behavior of these particles.
Now, quantum mechanics is an elemental branch of physics that describes and predicts the way that matter and energy will behave on the smallest and largest scales. Quantum mechanics is explains pretty much every force of nature besides gravity.
We’d like to thank Miss Sue Lang on this great article.
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