![]() Electrons had been named just six years earlier as part of the emerging theory of atoms. The seeds of the quantum revolution appear in the discovery by JJ Thomson in 1897 that cathode rays were not continuous but "corpuscles" now called electrons. Liquid helium in a container, cooled to a temperature near absolute zero spontaneously flows up and over the rim of its container, an effect which cannot be explained by classical physics. Many remarkable phenomena can be explained using quantum mechanics, like superfluidity. Quantum mechanics helps us understand chemistry, because it explains how atoms interact with each other and form molecules. This applies even though the particles may be so far apart that it is impossible for the result of the first measurement to have been transmitted to the second particle before the second measurement takes place. In certain circumstances, two particles with a shared history may become mutually 'entangled', in which case a measurement made on one particle (such as an electron that is measured to have spin up) will be statistically correlated with the outcome of an equivalent measurement on the other particle (that the other will be more likely to be found to have spin down). One example of this is the uncertainty principle: precise measurements of position cannot be combined with precise measurements of velocity. Features of quantum mechanics often defy simple explanations in everyday language. In the words of quantum physicist Richard Feynman, quantum mechanics deals with "nature as She is-absurd". Many aspects of quantum mechanics are counterintuitive and can seem paradoxical because they describe behavior quite different from that seen at larger scales. The desire to resolve inconsistencies between observed phenomena and classical theory led to a revolution in physics, a shift in the original scientific paradigm: the development of quantum mechanics. ![]() However, towards the end of the 19th century, scientists discovered phenomena in both the large ( macro) and the small ( micro) worlds that classical physics could not explain. ![]() Classical physics is still used in much of modern science and technology. By contrast, classical physics explains matter and energy only on a scale familiar to human experience, including the behavior of astronomical bodies such as the moon. Quantum mechanics is the study of matter and its interactions with energy on the scale of atomic and subatomic particles. ![]()
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