"According to Newton, light was described by particles. His work on gravity, was also interested in optics," saysīouatta. Sometimes it is better to think of them as The problem is that the objects quantum mechanics tries to describeĭon't always behave like tiny little billiard balls. In quantum mechanics we ask the same question, but the answer is tricky because position and momentum are no longer the right variables to describe. "The kind of question we then ask is: if we know the initial conditions of a system, that is, we know the system at time what is the dynamical evolution of this system? And we use Newton’s second law for that. For example, if you’ve got a table full of moving billiard balls and you know the position and the momentum (that’s the mass times the velocity) of each ball at some time, then you know all there is to know about the system at that time : where everything is, where everything is going and how fast. "In classical mechanics we describe a state of a physical system using position and momentum," explains Nazim Bouatta, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge. TheĬore equation of this theory, the analogue of Newton's second law, is called To describe this tiny world you need quantum mechanics,Ī theory developed at the beginning of the twentieth century. Smallest scales, for example electrons orbiting the nucleus of anĪtom, they realised that things get very weird indeed and that Newton's laws no longerĪpply. Or can it? When people first started considering the world at the
Schrödinger's equation is named after Erwin Schrödinger, 1887-1961.
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