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At the beginning of the 20th century
The scientists thought that they had managed to understand most of the fundamental principles of nature, but they were wrong. -
Max Plank. The precursor of the Quantum
It is considered that Quantum mechanic was born in 1900 when the German physicist Max Planck presented his work 'The theory of the law of distribution of energies of the normal spectrum', which would be the precursor of a revolution in Physics. In this work he said that matter can only emit or absorb energy in small discrete units called quanta and introduced a universal constant of great importance: Planck's constant. -
Albert Einstein
He took Plank's ideas seriously. He proposed a quantum of light (the photon) that behaves like a particle. Einstein's other theories explained the equivalence between mass and energy, the particle-wave duality of photons, the equivalence principle, and especially relativity. -
Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden
Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, under the supervision of Ernest Rutherford, scattered alpha particles through gold foil and observed large scattering angles; they suggested that atoms have a small, dense nucleus, positively charged. -
Rutherford
He affirmed the existence of the nucleus as a result of the scattering of alpha particles in the experiment conducted by Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden. -
Albert Einstein
Explained space-time curvature -
Niels Bohr
Developed a theory of atomic structure, based on quantum ideas. -
Ernest Rutherford
Found the first evidence of a proton, as a result of one of his experiments -
Arthur Compton
Discovered the quantum (particle) nature of x-rays, thereby confirming the photon as a particle. -
Louis de Broglie
Proposed that matter has wave properties -
Erwin Schroedinger
He developed wave mechanics, which describes the behavior of quantum systems made up of bosons -
Werner Heisenberg
Formulated the principle of uncertainty: the more you know about the energy of a particle, the less you know about how long that energy has (and vice versa.) The same uncertainty applies to the coordinate. -
Paul Dirac
Combined quantum mechanics and special relativity to describe the electron -
Wolfgang Pauli
Suggested the neutrino to explain the continuous spectrum of electrons in beta decay.
The beta decay is a process by which an unstable nuclide or nucleide emits a beta particle to compensate for the ratio of neutrons and protons of the atomic nucleus. -
Paul Dirac
He understood that the positively charged particles, that he called "positrons" are exactly like electrons, but positively charged. This is the first example of antiparticles. -
James Chadwick
He descovered the neutron -
Enrico Fermi
He developed a theory of beta decay that included the neutrino, which was assumed to have neither mass nor charge. -
Hideki Yukawa
combined relativity and quantum theory to describe nuclear interactions based on the exchange, between protons and neutrons, of new particles (mesons called "pions"). From the size of the nucleus, Yukawa concluded that the mass of the putative particles (mesons) is greater than the mass of 200 electrons. This is the beginning of the mesonic theory of nuclear forces. -
C. Moller y Abraham Pais
they introduced the term "nucleon" as a generic term for protons and neutrons. -
Enrico Fermi y C.N. Yang
Suggest that a pion is a structure composed of a nucleon and an antinucleon. This idea of composite particles is completely revolutionary. -
Donald Glaser
Invented the bubble camera. The Brookhaven Cosmotron, a 1.3 GeV or electron volts accelerator, begins operating. Cosmotron was the first machine to produce all the types of negative and positive mesons known to exist in cosmic rays. It was also the first accelerator to produce unstable heavy particles, some of which were previously called V particles, and this led directly to the experimental confirmation of the theory of associated foreign particle production. -
Theodore Maiman
builds the first laser, a device based on quantum theory: the stimulation of an atom with a photon whose energy corresponds to a transition between two energetic states of the atom causes the emission of another photon similar to the first, which makes it possible to produce coherent light . The laser is used today in countless technologies -
John Stewart Bell
A study by John Stewart Bell on the EPR paradox shows that quantum mechanics is incompatible with hidden variables of each particle (local) that according to Einstein would explain the behavior of entangled particles. Since 1972, countless experiments have shown that quantum entanglement appears to work according to the "mysterious action at a distance" -
Paul Benioff
Demonstrates for the first time the theoretical basis of quantum computing, proposing a quantum version of the Turing machine (a mathematical model of computation). Around the same time, Yuri Manin and Richard Feynman developed the idea of the quantum computer. The first experimental demonstrations of quantum algorithms would not arrive until 1998 -
Quantum cryptography
Quantum cryptography is the cryptography that uses principles of quantum mechanics to guarantee the absolute confidentiality of the transmitted information. Quantum cryptography as an idea was proposed in 1970, but it was not until 1984 that the first protocol was published. -
First Quantum Teletransport
A study is based on quantum entanglement to raise the theoretical possibility of the teleportation of information between separate particles in space, in principle regardless of distance. Since 1998, this quantum teleportation has been experimentally demonstrated on many occasions, each time at greater distances and in more complex systems. -
Advances
In December 2020, China published that its Jiuzhang computer had solved in 20 seconds a problem that would take 600 million years to a classic computer.