Quantum mechanics
Quantum mechanics is a conceptual framework for understanding the microscopic properties of the universe at atomic and subatomic distance scales[1]. It was developed between 1912 and 1927, primarily through the work of the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who first conceived the basic principles, and the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger and the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, who refined them mathematically[2].
Its principles reveal that a number of basic conceptions essential to our understanding of the familiar everyday world of galaxies, stars, planets and cricket balls fail to have any meaning at the microscopic level. Indeed, it has been said that while everyone is at least capable of understanding the theories of special and general relativity, no one, including many of quantum theory’s most eminent philosophers and practitioners really understands what goes on with the universe at its most microscopic, sub-atomic level[3].
Here we enter a counter-intuitive world of constant jitters where particles never sit still, and whose equations deal in terms of probabilities, not certainties[4].
[1] Greene (2000), 86- 87.
[2] Lawrence M Krauss, Why there is something rather than nothing – A Universe from Nothin, Free Press, New York, 2012, 58-59.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Marcelo Gleiser, Imperfect Creation, op cit, 62.