Summary of Important Ideas in Quantum Physics

Summary of Important Ideas in Quantum Physics

1) The Universe is quantized. Familiar quantities such as energy, momentum, electric charge, mass – possibly even time and space – are not continuous. They occur in discrete quantum units. This fact is not directly observable in day-to-day life because the intervals between the units are incredibly small.

2) At the atomic level, the behavior of particles is not classical; i.e., they cannot be described by Newtonian physics. Indeed, “particles” as such do not exist at the atomic level. The “position” of the entities to which we have given names such as “electron”, “proton”, or “neutrino” can only be described in a statistical sense. All that quantum mechanics can tell us about the position of anything is that it has such-and-such relative probability of being here or there as opposed to someplace else.

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