Quantum Physics I: The culprit was This year I enrolled in Quantum Physics. I did it because it is core and some years I had to. I've always found that subjects had much more beautiful and interesting and I thought this would be a coming and going of differential equations without meaning ... I was wrong (it is a sea of \u200b\u200bequations, but not only).
is one of the most beautiful courses I've had so far and every school day leaves you stunned. I always leave class thinking about how people are being esoteric and pseudo-issues to fill a void that it fills more than science.
But let parts, such as grains. What is Quantum Physics? Let's tell a little story:
Traditionally scientists have observed nature closely and then developed their theories. So Newton laid the foundation for what we now call "Classical Mechanics." Physicists using classical mechanics were able to predict, for example, how fast an object would fall before the fall.
the mid-nineteenth century began to suggest that the role of physics in this world was over, reached the maximum possible knowledge, and that all that remained was to get physicists to more decimals in the results. Do not know to what extent were goofing ...
One day, early twentieth century, two physicists called Rayleigh and Jeans qusieron obtain the expression of the power spectral density of a black body. To us it is worth knowing that a black body is like a hollow body that absorbs all radiation that you take, we are not reflected or scattered at all. Every body, having a temperature, it emits energy in the form of radiation. Thus, although the box does not return anything to us, within it is no radiation. This radiation can be of many types, depending on their frequency (can be microwave, infrared, ultraviolet, visible light ...). These two physical wanted to know "how" of each type of radiation would be in the black body. Deduced some equations that predicted. Everyone agreed with that theory and then someone had to do an experiment and find out.
For low-frequency radiation prediction worked pretty well, but then, from the frequency of UV, the reality began to move away from the increasingly prediction until the theory did not serve anything at all. Nobody knew what happened. The physical, they always dramatic, called it "the ultraviolet catastrophe."
equations were revised again and again and nobody saw the slightest fault. But there was a young German physicist who was unwilling to surrender. One such person will not leave until you reach the goal: the Planck era. Planck
spent much time trying to understand what did not work, giving a thousand rounds, checking each of the assumptions of the theory.
The theory of Rayleigh and Jeans meant something anyone would have meant: you can have any amount of energy, ie energy is continuous, not discrete. That is, turn on a light bulb out of it continuously, not little by little.
Planck was set as a desperate, in this scenario and made the question of the child in him: Why?
In a last attempt, really desperate, Planck redid the theory assuming that light, instead of coming continuously, it was in small packets of light from a very small, but fixed. Each of these packages that he imagined he called "quanta" of light. What then was only a very questionable idea of \u200b\u200ba desperate man, would become one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science.
Planck's friend redid the theory y. .. Voila!, Suddenly his equations fit the reality.
Well, no big deal, or so it seems. Who cares about the power spectral density of the black body?
is not that, but many other theories had made the same assumption that Rayleigh and Jeans. We had to redo them all and see what happened ...
These quanta of energy are so small that in the macroscopic world (which see) can practically assume that the energy is continuous, but when we talk about very small things (like electrons) things change.
And then came a new world: the world of quantum mechanics ...
I hope to write a series of articles on some really incredible results of quantum mechanics.
