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Welcome to the World of Quantum Mechanics

    For the majority of the history of modern science the behavior of the universe and everything within it has been understood through the lens of what is now called classical physics. During the end of the 19th century and the beginnings of the 20th century technological and theoretical developments began to reveal behaviors in the physical world. One of the most famous of these is the problem of Blackbody Radiation. Classical physics would suggest that, as an object heats, increasing amounts of energy in the form of light would be released. This increase in radiancy would be inversely proportional to the fourth power of the wavelength, meaning that when a short wavelength is produced nearly infinite radiancy, or infinite energy is also produced. This contradicted known data, which showed radiancy began to drop off once the wavelength of light became ultraviolet. 

    This problem relied heavily on the notion that energy exchange continuously. The contradiction between theory and data led an iconic physicist of the era, Max Planck, to conclude that energy is not exchanged continuously, but in discrete chunks known as Quanta. This began a long trend of problems of classical physics being solved via quantum mechanics.

    Perhaps the most significant, and self-summarizing result of quantum mechanics is the Copenhagen Interpretation. Devised from 1925 to 1927 by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg this interpretation states that physical system do not have definite properties until measured.

Quantum Computing

    In classical computing information is stored in circuits in the form of Bits. These bits can exist in one of two states. In this way they are analogous to a binary encoding of information. A computer with quantum circuits encodes information in the form of Qubits. Rather than existing as a zero or a one, qubits are 2-D vectors where each axis corresponds to a zero or a one, and the magnitude of each component corresponds to the probability that a qubit will exist as a particular value when collapsed via measurement. This allows for the encoding and processing of much more information per unit of information when compared to classical computing.