Free About 1 hr0 learners Rev. 2026-10-28 0

On a Sunday in October 1900, a Berlin experimenter dropped by a colleague's house and mentioned some awkward numbers about glowing ovens. By that evening Max Planck had a formula, and within weeks he had a strange idea he did not fully believe: energy that comes in pieces. It took a patent clerk, a Danish lecturer, a French prince, a young man with hay fever on a North Sea island and a group of quarrelsome friends another quarter century to understand what he had started.

This is the human story of quantum physics, told without equations. You will follow the experiments that forced the new ideas, the arguments over breakfast in Brussels, the prediction of antimatter and the flight of physicists from Nazi Germany. Along the way you will see how a radical claim wins over skeptical experts, why two theories that look nothing alike can be the same theory, and how much science depends on the freedom of the people who make it.

Levels

  1. 1 1. Clouds over Classical Physics: Planck's Quantum 5-question quiz
  2. 2 2. Einstein's Light Quanta (1905 to 1925) 5-question quiz
  3. 3 3. The Nuclear Atom and Bohr's Quantum Jumps (1897 to 1922) 5-question quiz
  4. 4 4. Matter Waves, Spin and Heisenberg's Matrices (1923 to 1925) 5-question quiz
  5. 5 5. Schrödinger's Waves and Born's Probabilities (1926 to 1927) 5-question quiz
  6. 6 6. Solvay 1927 and the Bohr-Einstein Debates 5-question quiz
  7. 7 7. Dirac, Antimatter and the First Quantum Fields (1927 to 1949) 5-question quiz
  8. 8 8. Physicists, Power and Exile (1933 to 1950) 5-question quiz

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