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What you will learn in Quantum Physics
1. The Curve Nobody Could Draw
Classical physics predicted that every warm object radiates infinite power. It does not, and fixing that required assuming energy comes in lumps.
2. Through Both, One at a Time
Single particles, fired one after another, build up a pattern that requires two open slits — and stop doing so the moment you find out which slit each took.
3. Everything Has a Wavelength
Light, electrons, neutrons and molecules of twenty-five thousand atomic mass units all do it. Cricket balls do too — just not observably.
4. Colour Decides, Brightness Does Not
The experiment that forced light to be particles, and the graph that measured Planck's constant with a ruler.
5. An Atom That May Only Hold Certain Amounts
One assumption about angular momentum, and the size of a hydrogen atom and the energy it takes to break follow from it.
6. The Barcode of an Element
Fourteen measured hydrogen lines against fourteen predicted ones, and then the same test on helium, which the model fails completely.
7. Nowhere in Particular
The orbit is replaced by a probability distribution — one that peaks at exactly the radius Bohr had, and disagrees with him about everything else.
8. A Limit on What There Is to Know
Not a limit on instruments. Two arguments sharing no mathematics arrive at the same floor, and one of them is older than quantum mechanics.
9. Through the Wall
A particle crosses a barrier it has not the energy to climb — and that is why the Sun shines, why uranium decays, and how we photograph single atoms.
10. The Shell That Came Back
Alpha particles fired at gold foil almost all sail through, and a few bounce straight back. The only explanation is a nucleus — and the atom it implies is the one Bohr had to rescue.