And if you think quantum mechanics isn't a very powerful tool to understand the real world then explain how we're communicating by a means that is completely reliant on quantum mechanics.
10 Real-world Applications of Quantum Mechanics : Discovery Channel
10 Real-world Applications of Quantum Mechanics : Discovery Channel
For thousands of years, humans relied on their intuition to understand how the world works. Sure, the approach may have led to a few mistakes along the way -- it turns out the Earth isn't flat, for instance -- but ultimately it worked fairly well. Slowly but surely, humanity gained an understanding of everything from the laws of motion to thermodynamics, and all of it made intuitive sense.
And then came quantum mechanics, the absolutely baffling branch of physics exploring the very smallest types of matter. The study of quantum mechanics led to some truly astounding conclusions. For instance, scientists found that electrons behave both as waves and as particles, and the mere act of observing them changes the way they behave. Revelations like this one simply defied logic, prompting Einstein to declare "the more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it looks."
Einstein's sentiments still resonate today, more than a century after humanity's first insights into the quantum world; quantum mechanics makes perfect sense mathematically but defies our intuition at every turn. So it might surprise you that, despite its strangeness, quantum mechanics has led to some revolutionary inventions over the past century and promises to lead to many more in the years to come. Read on to learn about 10 practical applications of quantum mechanics.
In the fall of 1945, the U.S. Army completed its work on ENIAC, the world's first vacuum-tube computer. All told, ENIAC weighed more than 30 tons (27 metric tons), had the footprint of a small house and cost nearly half a million dollars to create [source: Weik]. Fortunately, by the time ENIAC was built, Bell Laboratories was already well on its way to developing a replacement for power-hungry, space-consuming vacuum tubes: the transistor. Transistors act as both an amplifier and a switch for electronic signals, functions essential to virtually all modern electronic equipment, and without quantum mechanics, they likely wouldn't exist.
That's because transistors rely on the unique properties of semiconductors -- materials that can act as either a conductor or an insulator -- to operate. Thanks to groundbreaking discoveries in quantum mechanics, Stanford researcher Eugene Wigner and his student, Frederick Seitz, were the first to manipulate the properties of semiconductors in the 1930s. Armed with their research, scientists from Bell Laboratories developed the first rudimentary transistors over the next decade, and by 1954, the United States military had constructed TRIDAC, the first transistor-based computer. Unlike the monstrous, unreliable vacuum-tube computers that preceded it, TRIDAC occupied only 3 cubic feet (0.08 cubic meters) and needed only 100 watts of power to operate [source: PBS]. Today, companies like Intel and AMD fabricate cutting-edge microprocessors containing billions of microprocessors, and we have quantum mechanics to thank.