20 Facts About Quantum mechanics

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.

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.

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

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

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

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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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.