![]() But if you want to understand how things work in many less esoteric situations – how electrons move or don’t move through a solid material and so make a material a metal, an insulator or a semiconductor, for example – things get even more complex. It characterises simple things such as how the position or momentum of a single particle or group of few particles changes over time.īut to understand how things work in the real world, quantum mechanics must be combined with other elements of physics – principally, Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which explains what happens when things move very fast – to create what are known as quantum field theories.Ĭonventional quantum field theories work well in describing the results of experiments at high-energy particle smashers such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, where the Higgs was discovered, which probe matter at its smallest scales. There’s quantum mechanics, the basic mathematical framework that underpins it all, which was first developed in the 1920s by Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger and others. ![]() ![]() To begin with, there’s no single quantum theory. The difficulty – and, for physicists, the fun – starts here. If you want to explain how electrons move through a computer chip, how photons of light get turned to electrical current in a solar panel or amplify themselves in a laser, or even just how the sun keeps burning, you’ll need to use quantum physics. You, me and the gatepost – at some level at least, we’re all dancing to the quantum tune. Quantum physics underlies how atoms work, and so why chemistry and biology work as they do. What is quantum physics? Put simply, it’s the physics that explains how everything works: the best description we have of the nature of the particles that make up matter and the forces with which they interact. ![]()
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