20 Facts About Quantum mechanics

1.

Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles.

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2.

Quantum mechanics arose gradually from theories to explain observations which could not be reconciled with classical physics, such as Max Planck's solution in 1900 to the black-body radiation problem, and the correspondence between energy and frequency in Albert Einstein's 1905 paper which explained the photoelectric effect.

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3.

Quantum mechanics allows the calculation of properties and behaviour of physical systems.

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4.

Predictions of quantum mechanics have been verified experimentally to an extremely high degree of accuracy.

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5.

One consequence of the mathematical rules of quantum mechanics is a tradeoff in predictability between different measurable quantities.

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6.

Quantum mechanics tunnelling has several important consequences, enabling radioactive decay, nuclear fusion in stars, and applications such as scanning tunnelling microscopy and the tunnel diode.

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7.

Quantum mechanics entanglement enables the counter-intuitive properties of quantum pseudo-telepathy, and can be a valuable resource in communication protocols, such as quantum key distribution and superdense coding.

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8.

Newer interpretations of quantum mechanics have been formulated that do away with the concept of "wave function collapse" .

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9.

An alternative formulation of quantum mechanics is Feynman's path integral formulation, in which a quantum-mechanical amplitude is considered as a sum over all possible classical and non-classical paths between the initial and final states.

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10.

Quantum mechanics has had enormous success in explaining many of the features of our universe, with regards to small-scale and discrete quantities and interactions which cannot be explained by classical methods.

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11.

Quantum mechanics is often the only theory that can reveal the individual behaviors of the subatomic particles that make up all forms of matter .

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12.

An important guide for making these choices is the correspondence principle, a heuristic which states that the predictions of quantum mechanics reduce to those of classical mechanics in the regime of large quantum numbers.

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13.

When quantum mechanics was originally formulated, it was applied to models whose correspondence limit was non-relativistic classical mechanics.

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14.

Quantum mechanics decoherence is a mechanism through which quantum systems lose coherence, and thus become incapable of displaying many typically quantum effects: quantum superpositions become simply probabilistic mixtures, and quantum entanglement becomes simply classical correlations.

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15.

Quantum mechanics electrodynamics is, along with general relativity, one of the most accurate physical theories ever devised.

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16.

Since its inception, the many counter-intuitive aspects and results of quantum mechanics have provoked strong philosophical debates and many interpretations.

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17.

Einstein believed that underlying quantum mechanics must be a theory that explicitly forbids action at a distance.

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18.

Quantum mechanics argued that quantum mechanics was incomplete, a theory that was valid but not fundamental, analogous to how thermodynamics is valid, but the fundamental theory behind it is statistical mechanics.

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19.

Relational quantum mechanics appeared in the late 1990s as a modern derivative of Copenhagen-type ideas, and QBism was developed some years later.

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20.

Quantum mechanics was developed in the early decades of the 20th century, driven by the need to explain phenomena that, in some cases, had been observed in earlier times.

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