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Quantum Supremacy: Chapter 3

Follows a series of physics milestones that shaped how we understand particles and quantum theory.

Raleigh-Jeans catastrophe: calculating the light emitted from an atom using Newton's theory applied to an atom, shows that energy emitted is infinite at high frequiences (which is impossible). Planck solved this problem by assuming energy comes in discrete packets (rather than continous like Newton suggested) which are known as quanta.
Plank's constant is the size of quantum of energy.
Einstein found that light can act like a wave or a particle.
Broglie found that atoms can act like a wave or a particle.
Schrondinger wrote a wave equation for electrons
If an electron is a wave, what is waving?
Uncertainty principle says that we can't prove if an particle was somewhere, only if it wasn't because it can be in two places at once. Schrondinger said this was crazy and came up with Schrondinger's cat to prove that whether you know if the cat in the box is dead or alive, it's only in one state. However, others saw it as being in two states because of the uncertainty.
Before you observe a particle, it exists in infinite states. But when you look at it, it collapses into the state that you observe.
Neumann said there was an invisible wall that seperated the physics in the microworld and the macroworld
Entanglement: when two objects are cohorent (vibrating at the same frequency) with each other, they stay conherent dispite distance between them. This came out of a paradox that Einstein proposed that nothing can travel faster than speed of light including this communication between particles.