QUANTUM PHYSICS for Beginners in 90 Minutes without Math: All the major ideas of quantum mechanics, from quanta to entanglement, in simple language by Modern Science

Author:Modern Science [Science, Modern]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2017-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

The Shortest History of the Atom

The very concept of the division of matter into atoms has an extremely long history. For the first two millennia of theorizing, though, atoms had been considered only at the level of arbitrary assumptions or philosophy, whereas scientists have been working with the concept of elementary units of matter for merely the three last centuries. In the 17-18th centuries, at the dawn of modern experimental science, some of the most prominent scholars tended to believe in the theoretical existence of atoms, but at the time they had virtually no concrete concepts or serious arguments (Robert Boyle, Newton). In the late 18th/early 19th century, the first truly scientific arguments were formulated, and the concrete concept of atoms and molecules and their interactions and transformations began to form (Antoine Lavoisier, John Dalton). For instance, Dalton’s argument was that substances always interacted in distinct ratios, which suggested that these substances had single minimal units that interacted by the piece. Although in the 19th century the concept of elementary units of matter significantly developed its scientific foundation (Avogadro, Cannizzaro, Maxwell, Boltzmann), atoms and molecules were still not widely recognized, because such a microscopic world could be studied only by indirect evidence up until the discovery of the tunnelling scanning microscope (a product of advanced quantum physics!) at the end of the 20th century, which shows with relative clarity the surface of substances as a set of identical, neat, spherical structures. However, the recognition of the concept of elementary units of substances came much earlier than that and was still based on the indirect argument, which was backed-up mathematically with high-precision experimental measurements.

When the first idea of quanta was proposed in 1900, the general scientific community still did not believe in atoms and molecules. The turning point was 1905, when none other than Albert Einstein formulated the most convincing justification of why all substances consist of particles. Einstein’s justification includes theoretical and mathematical aspects. The unexplained random motion (Brownian motion ) of the smallest particles viewed in clear water using a microscope (back then the smallest visible particles were spores, pollen, and sandstones) had been observed for almost a century already, which Einstein explained as being caused by the constant random collisions of these particles with separate microscopic particles of water, which themselves are constantly in motion (thermal motion of molecules). Mathematically, Einstein expressed the dependence of the particle movement on their size, the temperature of the liquid and the viscosity of the liquid. This complete scientific theory of the explanation of Brownian motion was soon proven in experiments with high accuracy, which left no doubts about the already-existing theoretical model of elementary units of substances and their interactions and transformations.

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