Quantum Mechanics

Röntgen’s X-rays allowed us to see through solid matter, as though by magic, while Marie Curie earned her place in history through her work on radioactivity, becoming the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize.

Ömer E.

Our Sun is only hot enough to fuse hydrogen to form helium and a few other light elements. More massive stars can make heavier elements like lead and gold when they explode in a supernova.

Reklam

Ömer E.

This was the first indication that different rules applied at the tiniest scales. Planck was a somewhat reluctant revolutionary and was never really happy with his new theory, even though it beautifully explained the way bodies radiated heat, when all previous attempts had failed. Others would, however, take his idea and run with it. The word quantum comes from the Latin quantus, meaning ‘how great’, and came into general use in physics in the first few years of the twentieth century to denote the smallest indivisible piece.

Ömer E.

While Bohr and Heisenberg were developing their mathematical picture of atoms, an Austrian physicist named Erwin Schrödinger was presenting a different approach, suggesting that the entire subatomic world is made up of waves. His theory became known as wave mechanics and the famous equation that bears his name describes how such ‘quantum’ waves change over time.

Ömer E.

That is, if an atom were a football stadium, its nucleus would be a garden pea on the centre spot.

Ömer E.

In 1900 the German physicist Max Planck explained the way hot bodies emit electromagnetic radiation (as heat and light) at different wavelengths. He proposed that the energy of this radiation was proportional to its frequency: the higher the frequency (or the shorter the wavelength), the higher its energy will be, and the ratio of the two quantities (energy divided by frequency) was therefore a constant number, which still bears his name: Planck’s constant.