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Quantum mechanics is the science that is fundamental to understanding all nature. It explains the central workings of atoms, molecules and of the more complicated systems they form: solids, liquids, gases, plasmas, including biological systems. It has allowed us to penetrate the atom to see that protons and neutrons are made of quarks and gluons. We now know about the multitude of elementary particles, such as neutrinos and Higgs bosons.
What quantum mechanics tells us is that particles, for example, the electron or the helium atom, once thought to be small solid entities, often act more like waves than particles. In an opposite situation, light, once thought to be entirely explained by wave behavior, is found to have energy carried by particle like quanta called photons. There is a particle–wave duality in nature that was not fully realized before about 1920. Erwin Schrödinger developed his famous wave equation in 1925 and we have been using it ever since to explain the universe.
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