why use quantum mechanics essays

why use quantum mechanics essays 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. Newtons 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 pr ...