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 goin g 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. At the turn of the century, scientists thought that all the basic rules like thi s should apply to everything in nature -- but then they began to study the world of the ultra-small. Atoms, electrons, light waves, none of these things follow ed the normal rules. As physicists like Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein began to study particles, they discovered new physics laws that were downright quirky. These were the laws of quantum mechanics, and they got their name from the work of Max Planck. "An Act of Desperation" In 1900, Max Planck was a physicist in Berlin studying something called the "ult raviolet catastrophe." The problem was the laws of physics predicted that if yo u heat up a box in such a way that no light can get out (known as a "black box") , it should produce an infinite amount of ultraviolet radiation. In real life n o such thing happened: the box radiated different colors, red, blue, white, just as heated metal does, but there was no infinite amount of anything. It didn't m ake sense. These were laws of physics that perfectly described how light behave d outside of the box -- why didn't they accurately describe this black box scena rio? Planck tried a mathematical trick. He presumed that the light wasn't really a c ontinuous wave as everyone assumed, but perhaps could exist with only specific a mounts, or "quanta," of energy. Planck didn't really believe this was true abou t light, in fact he later referred to this math gimmick as "an act of desperatio n." But with this adjustment, the equations worked, accurately describing the b ox's radiation. It took instein iscrete Gilbert awhile for everyone to agree on what this meant, but eventually Albert E interpreted Planck's equations to mean that light can be thought of as d particles, just like electrons or protons. In 1926, Berkeley physicist Lewis named them photons.

Quanta, quanta everywhere This idea that particles could only contain lumps of energy in certain sizes mov ed into other areas of physics as well. Over the next decade, Niels Bohr pulled it into his description of how an atom worked. He said that electrons travelin g around a nucleus couldn't have arbitrarily small or arbitrarily large amounts of energy, they could only have multiples of a standard "quantum" of energy. Eventually scientists realized this explained why some materials are conductors of electricity and some aren't -- since atoms with differing energy electron orb its conduct electricity differently. This understanding was crucial to building a transistor, since the crystal at its core is made by mixing materials with var ying amounts of conductivity. But They're Waves Too Here's one of the quirky things about quantum mechanics: just because an electro n or a photon can be thought of as a particle, doesn't mean they can't still be

though of as a wave as well. In fact, in a lot of experiments light acts much m ore like a wave than like a particle. This wave nature produces some interesting effects. For example, if an electron traveling around a nucleus behaves like a wave, then its position at any one ti me becomes fuzzy. Instead of being in a concrete point, the electron is smeared out in space. This smearing means that electrons don't always travel quite the way one would expect. Unlike water flowing along in one direction through a ho se, electrons traveling along as electrical current can sometimes follow weird p aths, especially if they're moving near the surface of a material. Moreover, el ectrons acting like a wave can sometimes burrow right through a barrier. Unders tanding this odd behavior of electrons was necessary as scientists tried to cont rol how current flowed through the first transistors. So which is it - a particle or a wave? Scientists interpret quantum mechanics to mean that a tiny piece of material lik e a photon or electron is both a particle and a wave. It can be either, dependi ng on how one looks at it or what kind of an experiment one is doing. In fact, it might be more accurate to say that photons and electrons are neither a partic le or a wave -- they're undefined up until the very moment someone looks at them or performs an experiment, thus forcing them to be either a particle or a wave. This comes with other side effects: namely that a number of qualities for partic les aren't well-defined. For example, there is a theory by Werner Heisenberg ca lled the Uncertainty Principle. It states that if a researcher wants to measure the speed and position of a particle, he can't do both very accurately. If he measures the speed carefully, then he can't measure the position nearly as well. This doesn't just mean he doesn't have good enough measurement tools -- it's m ore fundamental than that. If the speed is well-established then there simply d oes not exist a well-established position (the electron is smeared out like a wa ve) and vice versa. Albert Einstein disliked this idea. When confronted with the notion that the la ws of physics left room for such vagueness he announced: "God does not play dice with the universe." Nevertheless, most physicists today accept the laws of qua ntum mechanics as an accurate description of the subatomic world. And certainly it was a thorough understanding of these new laws which helped Bardeen, Brattai n, and Shockley invent the transistor. Resources: -- Where Does the Weirdness Go? Why Quantum Mechanics is Strange, But Not as Str ange as You Think, David Lindley -- What is Quantum Mechanics? A Physics Adventure, Transnational College of LEX -- The Handy Physics Answer Book, P. Erik Gundersen -- Albert Einstein exhibit at the American Institute of Physics -- Heisenberg exhibit at the American Institute of Physics http://www.pbs.org/transistor/science/info/quantum.html