Quantum mechanics is a fundamental branch of physics that describes processes involving atoms and photons, in which physical action occurs in integer multiples of the Planck constant, which classical physics cannot explain. It arose from Max Planck's work on black-body radiation in 1900 and Albert Einstein's 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect. The modern theory was formulated in the mid-1920s using mathematical functions like the wave function to describe the probability of physical properties. It has important applications including lasers, transistors, medical imaging, and explanations of biological and physical phenomena.
Quantum mechanics is a fundamental branch of physics that describes processes involving atoms and photons, in which physical action occurs in integer multiples of the Planck constant, which classical physics cannot explain. It arose from Max Planck's work on black-body radiation in 1900 and Albert Einstein's 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect. The modern theory was formulated in the mid-1920s using mathematical functions like the wave function to describe the probability of physical properties. It has important applications including lasers, transistors, medical imaging, and explanations of biological and physical phenomena.
Quantum mechanics is a fundamental branch of physics that describes processes involving atoms and photons, in which physical action occurs in integer multiples of the Planck constant, which classical physics cannot explain. It arose from Max Planck's work on black-body radiation in 1900 and Albert Einstein's 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect. The modern theory was formulated in the mid-1920s using mathematical functions like the wave function to describe the probability of physical properties. It has important applications including lasers, transistors, medical imaging, and explanations of biological and physical phenomena.
Quantum mechanics (QM; also known as quantum physics or quantum
theory) including quantum field theory, is a fundamental branch ofphysics
concerned with processes involving, for example, atoms and photons. In such processes, said to be quantized, the action has been observed to be only in integer multiples of the Planck constant, a physical quantity that is exceedingly, indeed perhaps ultimately, small. This is utterly inexplicable in classical physics. Quantum mechanics gradually arose from Max Planck's solution in 1900 to the black-body radiation problem (reported 1859) and Albert Einstein's 1905 paper which offered a quantum-based theory to explain the photoelectric effect (reported 1887). Early quantum theory was profoundly reconceived in the mid-1920s. The reconceived theory is formulated in various specially developed mathematical formalisms. In one of them, a mathematical function, thewave function, provides information about the probability amplitude of position, momentum, and other physical properties of a particle. Important applications of quantum mechanical theory include superconducting magnets, light-emitting diodes and the laser, the transistor andsemiconductors such as the microprocessor, medical and research imaging such as magnetic resonance imaging and electron microscopy, and explanations for many biological and physical phenomena.