uantum mechanics is the branch of

physics relating to the very small. 

It results in what may appear to be some
very strange conclusions about the
physical world. At the scale of atoms and
electrons, many of the equations
of classical mechanics, which describe
how things move at everyday sizes and
speeds, cease to be useful. In classical
mechanics, objects exist in a specific
place at a specific time. However, in
quantum mechanics, objects instead exist
in a haze of probability; they have a
certain chance of being at point A,
another chance of being at point B and so
on.
Three revolutionary principles
Quantum mechanics (QM) developed
over many decades, beginning as a set of
controversial mathematical explanations
of experiments that the math of classical
mechanics could not explain. It began at
the turn of the 20th century, around the
same time that Albert Einstein published
his theory of relativity, a separate
mathematical revolution in physics that
describes the motion of things at high
speeds. Unlike relativity, however, the
origins of QM cannot be attributed to
any one scientist. Rather, multiple
scientists contributed to a foundation of
three revolutionary principles that
gradually gained acceptance and
experimental verification between 1900
and 1930. They are:
PUBLICIDAD
Quantized properties: Certain
properties, such as position, speed and
color, can sometimes only occur in
specific, set amounts, much like a dial
that "clicks" from number to number.
This challenged a fundamental
assumption of classical mechanics, which
said that such properties should exist on
a smooth, continuous spectrum. To
describe the idea that some properties
"clicked" like a dial with specific
settings, scientists coined the word
"quantized."
Particles of light: Light can sometimes
behave as a particle. This was initially
met with harsh criticism, as it ran
contrary to 200 years of experiments
showing that light behaved as a wave;
much like ripples on the surface of a
calm lake. Light behaves similarly in that
it bounces off walls and bends around
corners, and that the crests and troughs
of the wave can add up or cancel out.
Added wave crests result in brighter
light, while waves that cancel out
produce darkness. A light source can be
thought of as a ball on a stick
being rhythmically dipped in the center
of a lake. The color emitted corresponds
to the distance between the crests, which
is determined by the speed of the ball's
rhythm. 
Waves of matter: Matter can also behave
as a wave. This ran counter to the
roughly 30 years of experiments showing
that matter (such as electrons) exists as
particles.
Quantized properties?
In 1900, German physicist Max Planck
sought to explain the distribution of
colors emitted over the spectrum in the
glow of red-hot and white-hot objects,
such as light-bulb filaments. When
making physical sense of the equation he
had derived to describe this distribution,
Planck realized it implied that
combinations of only
certain colors (albeit a great number of
them) were emitted, specifically those
that were whole-number multiples of
some base value. Somehow, colors were
quantized! This was unexpected because
light was understood to act as a wave,
meaning that values of color should be a
continuous spectrum. What could be
forbidding atoms from producing the
colors between these whole-number
multiples? This seemed so strange that
Planck regarded quantization as nothing
more than a mathematical trick.
According to Helge Kragh in his 2000
article in Physics World magazine, "Max
Planck, the Reluctant Revolutionary,"
"If a revolution occurred in physics in
December 1900, nobody seemed to notice
it. Planck was no exception …" 
Planck's equation also contained a
number that would later become very
important to future development of QM;
today, it's known as "Planck's
Constant."
Quantization helped to explain other
mysteries of physics. In 1907, Einstein
used Planck's hypothesis of quantization
to explain why the temperature of a solid
changed by different amounts if you put
the same amount of heat into the
material but changed the starting
temperature.
Since the early 1800s, the science
of spectroscopy had shown that different
elements emit and absorb specific colors
of light called "spectral lines." Though
spectroscopy was a reliable method for
determining the elements contained in
objects such as distant stars, scientists
were puzzled about why each element
gave off those specific lines in the first
place. In 1888, Johannes Rydberg
derived an equation that described the
spectral lines emitted by hydrogen,
though nobody could explain why the
equation worked. This changed in 1913
when Niels Bohr applied Planck's
hypothesis of quantization to Ernest
Rutherford's 1911 "planetary" model of
the atom, which postulated that electrons
orbited the nucleus the same way that
planets orbit the sun. According
to Physics 2000 (a site from the
University of Colorado), Bohr proposed
that electrons were restricted to
"special" orbits around an atom's
nucleus. They could "jump" between
special orbits, and the energy produced
by the jump caused specific colors of
light, observed as spectral lines. Though
quantized properties were invented as
but a mere mathematical trick, they
explained so much that they became the
founding principle of QM.
Particles of light?
In 1905, Einstein published a paper,
"Concerning an Heuristic Point of View
Toward the Emission and
Transformation of Light," in which he
envisioned light traveling not as a wave,
but as some manner of "energy quanta."
This packet of energy, Einstein
suggested, could "be absorbed or
generated only as a whole," specifically
when an atom "jumps" between
quantized vibration rates. This would
also apply, as would be shown a few
years later, when an electron "jumps"
between quantized orbits. Under this
model, Einstein's "energy quanta"
contained the energy difference of the
jump; when divided by Planck’s
constant, that energy difference
determined the color of light carried by
those quanta. 
With this new way to envision light,
Einstein offered insights into the
behavior of nine different phenomena,
including the specific colors that Planck
described being emitted from a light-
bulb filament. It also explained how
certain colors of light could eject
electrons off metal surfaces, a
phenomenon known as the
"photoelectric effect." However, Einstein
wasn't wholly justified in taking this
leap, said Stephen Klassen, an associate
professor of physics at the University of
Winnipeg. In a 2008 paper, "The
Photoelectric Effect: Rehabilitating the
Story for the Physics Classroom,"
Klassen states that Einstein's energy
quanta aren't necessary for explaining all
of those nine phenomena. Certain
mathematical treatments of light as a
wave are still capable of describing both
the specific colors that Planck described
being emitted from a light-bulb filament
and the photoelectric effect. Indeed, in
Einstein's controversial winning of the
1921 Nobel Prize, the Nobel committee
only acknowledged "his discovery of the
law of the photoelectric effect," which
specifically did not rely on the notion of
energy quanta.
Roughly two decades after Einstein's
paper, the term "photon" was
popularized for describing energy
quanta, thanks to the 1923 work of
Arthur Compton, who showed that light
scattered by an electron beam changed in
color. This showed that particles of light
(photons) were indeed colliding with
particles of matter (electrons), thus
confirming Einstein's hypothesis. By
now, it was clear that light could behave
both as a wave and a particle, placing
light's "wave-particle duality" into the
foundation of QM.
Waves of matter?
Since the discovery of the electron in
1896, evidence that all matter existed in
the form of particles was slowly building.
Still, the demonstration of light's wave-
particle duality made scientists question
whether matter was limited to
acting only as particles. Perhaps wave-
particle duality could ring true for
matter as well? The first scientist to
make substantial headway with this
reasoning was a French physicist named
Louis de Broglie. In 1924, de Broglie
used the equations of Einstein's theory of
special relativity to show that particles
can exhibit wave-like characteristics, and
that waves can exhibit particle-like
characteristics. Then in 1925, two
scientists, working independently and
using separate lines of mathematical
thinking, applied de Broglie's reasoning
to explain how electrons whizzed around
in atoms (a phenomenon that was
unexplainable using the equations
of classical mechanics). In Germany,
physicist Werner Heisenberg (teaming
with Max Born and Pascual Jordan)
accomplished this by developing "matrix
mechanics." Austrian physicist
Erwin Schrödinger developed a similar
theory called "wave mechanics."
Schrödinger showed in 1926 that these
two approaches were equivalent (though
Swiss physicist Wolfgang Pauli sent
an unpublished result to Jordan showing
that matrix mechanics was more
complete).
The Heisenberg-Schrödinger model of
the atom, in which each electron acts as a
wave (sometimes referred to as a
"cloud") around the nucleus of an atom
replaced the Rutherford-Bohr model.
One stipulation of the new model was
that the ends of the wave that forms an
electron must meet. In "Quantum
Mechanics in Chemistry, 3rd Ed." (W.A.
Benjamin, 1981), Melvin Hanna writes,
"The imposition of the boundary
conditions has restricted the energy to
discrete values." A consequence of this
stipulation is that only whole numbers of
crests and troughs are allowed, which
explains why some properties are
quantized. In the Heisenberg-
Schrödinger model of the atom, electrons
obey a "wave function" and occupy
"orbitals" rather than orbits. Unlike the
circular orbits of the Rutherford-Bohr
model, atomic orbitals have a variety of
shapes ranging from spheres to
dumbbells to daisies.
In 1927, Walter Heitler and Fritz
London further developed wave
mechanics to show how atomic orbitals
could combine to form molecular
orbitals, effectively showing why atoms
bond to one another to form molecules.
This was yet another problem that had
been unsolvable using the math of
classical mechanics. These insights gave
rise to the field of "quantum chemistry."
The uncertainty principle
Also in 1927, Heisenberg made another
major contribution to quantum physics.
He reasoned that since matter acts as
waves, some properties, such as an
electron's position and speed, are
"complementary," meaning there's a
limit (related to Planck's constant) to
how well the precision of each property
can be known. Under what would come
to be called "Heisenberg's uncertainty
principle," it was reasoned that the more
precisely an electron's position is known,
the less precisely its speed can be known,
and vice versa. This uncertainty
principle applies to everyday-size objects
as well, but is not noticeable because the
lack of precision is extraordinarily tiny.
According to Dave Slaven of
Morningside College (Sioux City, IA), if
a baseball's speed is known to within
a precision of 0.1 mph, the maximum
precision to which it is possible to know
the ball's position is
0.000000000000000000000000000008
millimeters.
Onward
The principles of quantization, wave-
particle duality and the uncertainty
principle ushered in a new era for QM.
In 1927, Paul Dirac applied a quantum
understanding of electric and magnetic
fields to give rise to the study of
"quantum field theory" (QFT), which
treated particles (such as photons and
electrons) as excited states of an
underlying physical field. Work in QFT
continued for a decade until scientists hit
a roadblock: Many equations in QFT
stopped making physical sense because
they produced results of infinity. After a
decade of stagnation, Hans Bethe made a
breakthrough in 1947 using a technique
called "renormalization." Here, Bethe
realized that all infinite results related to
two phenomena (specifically "electron
self-energy" and "vacuum polarization")
such that the observed values of electron
mass and electron charge could be used
to make all the infinities disappear.
Since the breakthrough of
renormalization, QFT has served as the
foundation for developing quantum
theories about the four fundamental
forces of nature: 1) electromagnetism, 2)
the weak nuclear force, 3) the strong
nuclear force and 4) gravity. The first
insight provided by QFT was a quantum
description of electromagnetism through
"quantum electrodynamics" (QED),
which made strides in the late 1940s and
early 1950s. Next was a quantum
description of the weak nuclear force,
which was unified with electromagnetism
to build "electroweak theory" (EWT)
throughout the 1960s. Finally came a
quantum treatment of the strong nuclear
force using "quantum chromodynamics"
(QCD) in the 1960s and 1970s. The
theories of QED, EWT and QCD
together form the basis of the Standard
Model of particle physics. Unfortunately,
QFT has yet to produce a quantum
theory of gravity. That quest continues
today in the studies of string theory and
loop quantum gravity.
Robert Coolman is a graduate researcher
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
finishing up his Ph.D. in chemical
engineering. He writes about math,
science and how they interact with history.
Follow Robert @PrimeViridian.
Follow us @LiveScience, Facebook & G
oogle+.
Additional resources
 This TED-Ed video explains the
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
  Take an online course in Quantum
Physics I from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
 Learn more about the quantum
mechanical model of the atom and
how it differs from the Rutherford-
Bohrs model.
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