Power in Numbers by Talithia Williams

Author:Talithia Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MBI
Published: 2018-05-23T04:00:00+00:00

This graph shows the amplitudes of the frequency spectra for Daubechies’ 4-tap wavelet.

WHAT IS QUANTUM MECHANICS?

In 1900, physicist Max Planck put forward his revolutionary quantum hypothesis that energy is radiated and absorbed in discrete packets he called “quanta.” Five years later Albert Einstein used Planck’s theory to explain the photoelectric effect (i.e., the emission of electrons when light shines on a material). Since that time, important developments have been made by the likes of Erwin Schrödinger (of “Schrödinger’s cat”* fame) and Werner Heisenberg (who developed the Heisenberg uncertainty principle2). Today, the field of quantum mechanics, with its insights on the nature of atoms and subatomic particles, has made possible the development of many important modern technologies, including medical and research imaging, lasers, and computer microprocessors.

*The famous Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment was devised by the Austrian physicist in 1935. In it he asks subjects to imagine a cat concealed in a box with a flask of poison, a Geiger counter, and a radioactive substance. If the Geiger counter detects even one radioactive atom decaying, the flask will be shattered, releasing the poison and killing the cat. According to one interpretation of quantum mechanics, the cat is considered both dead and alive (i.e., in a state of quantum superposition) because there’s no knowing when the random decay event will occur, and the external observer has no way of knowing whether it has or has not occurred. With this scenario, Schrödinger challenges us to ask the question, “When does quantum superposition end and reality begin? When I peek in the box and see either a dead cat or a live cat?”

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