Quantum Mechanics

Quantum mechanics may seem like an abstract theory far removed from everyday experience, but in fact it's essential to something as mundane as an alarm clock.

This overview of the different aspects of quantum physics is intended to provide some perspective to those new to the subject, so that they can further explore the wonders inherent in this miraculous realm.

For nearly a century, reality has been a murky concept. The laws of quantum physics seem to suggest that particles spend much of their time in a ghostly state, lacking even basic properties such as a definite location and instead existing everywhere and nowhere at once.

Many people who have sat through introductory physics courses in high school or college might disagree with the claim, "Newtonian mechanics makes intuitive sense to us." They may remember the subject as a bewildering merry-go-round of pulleys and vectors and inclined planes, and think that "intuitive sense" is the last thing that Newtonian mechanics should be accused of making.

A wave of experiments is probing the root of quantum weirdness.

Todd's Intro to Quantum Mechanics provides the average non-scientist with a brief overview of the importance and wonder of quantum mechanics.

In day to day life, we intuitively understand how the world works. Drop a glass and it will smash to the floor. Push a wagon and it will roll along. Walk to a wall and you can't walk through it. There are very basic laws of physics going on all around us that we instinctively grasp: gravity makes things fall to the ground, pushing something makes it move, two things can't occupy the same place at the same time.

Quantum mechanics is the body of scientific laws that describe the wacky behavior of photons, electrons and the other particles that make up the universe.

Quantum mechanics (QM; also known as quantum physics or quantum theory) including quantum field theory, is a fundamental branch of physics concerned with processes involving, for example, atoms and photons.

Quantum mechanics is the science of the very small: the body of scientific principles that explains the behaviour of matter and its interactions with energy on the scale of atoms and subatomic particles.