CONCLUSION

This has been a necessarily abbreviated and condensed foray into the wonderful, and sometimes bizarre, world of quantum mechanics. If a couple of fundamental principles of quantum physics were to be singled out from all of the above, they would probably be the dual wave-like and particle-like behaviour of matter and radiation, and the prediction of probabilities in situations where classical physics predicts certainties.

For many, even those in the scientific community, these are difficult concepts to come to terms with, and even Albert Einstein had serious philosophical problems with a universe which behaves in an apparently totally random manner at the sub-atomic level, repeatedly claiming that “God does not play dice” (although he is widely considered to have “lost” the extensive public debates he carried on with Niels Bohr). For a better or more comprehensive understanding of this complex and confusing subject, there is a copious amount of literature on the subject, both for the beginner and the expert alike, a few of which are mentioned on the Sources page.

Despite its difficulties, however, quantum theory remains an essential part of the bedrock of modern physics. It is arguably one of the most successful theories in all of science, and, despite its seemingly esoteric nature, it is primarily a practical branch of physics, paving the way for applications such as the laser, the electron microscope, the transistor, the superconductor and nuclear power, as well as explaining at a stroke important physical phenomena such as chemical bonding, the structure of the atom, the conduction of electricity, the mechanical and thermal properties of solids and the stiffness of collapsed stars.

As has been mentioned in other sections, the way forward for physics seems now to rest with attempts to combine quantum theory with the General Theory of Relativity in a unified theory of quantum gravity (or quantum theory of gravity), the so-called “theory of everything”, which it is hoped will make sense of the entire universe. Candidates like superstring theory and loop quantum gravity, however, still need to overcome major formal and conceptual problems before such a claim can be made.