What is quantum physics in simple terms or with a real-world example?
In: Physics
Real-world example? How about how solar panels work?
Light is obviously a wave. When you send it through a prism, it refracts into a rainbow (something waves do). When you send it through a very small slit, it diffracts into bands (something else waves do). Light colour is the frequency of the light (something waves have). Everyone agrees light must be a wave.
But something weird happens if you shoot light at metal. If you shoot light with a high enough frequency, electricity start flowing out of the metal. More light gives more electricity flowing out. If you lower the frequency though, at some point the electricity just suddenly stops. Once the electricity stops, you can shoot as much light as you want, you can’t get electricity to come out. With the standard “light is a wave” explanation, this phenomenon makes no sense.
Einstein figured out that light is actually made up of individual particles. More light is just more particles. Weirdly though, these particles still have colour, which we said was just the frequency of the waves… Kinda weird, but let’s keep going. So the “frequency” of these particles actually tells us the energy of each individual particle. If we assume that each electron can only interact with a single light particle at a time, then it makes sense that only high-frequency light particles have enough energy to knock the electrons. More light particles hitting the metal means more electrons get knocked out per second, so more electricity.
Put this together and you figure out that shooting a lot of high frequency light at metal makes a solar panel, and you understand why.
So light is obviously a wave, but it’s made out of small particles somehow. It’s quantized.
Quantum mechanics is what you get when you apply that logic to *every* particle. Every particle is treated as a small quantized chunk of a wave, and we can calculate how those waves change and interact over time.
Everything you ever experience is the sum of all those tiny little quantized waves connecting and evolving together.
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