If you have fluorescent bulbs around- either the long tubes or the newer twisty CFL bulbs, you're getting light from another revolutionary quantum process.
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Gettyįluorescent Lights: Old-school incandescent light bulbs make light by getting a piece of wire hot enough to emit a bright white glow, which makes them quantum in the same way that a toaster is. dark blue background, leadership and different creative idea concept.
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One hanging eco energy saving light bulb glowing and standing out from unlit incandescent bulbs on. This cuts off the high-frequency light, and leads to a formula that matches the observed spectrum of light from hot objects to great precision. For high-frequency light, this energy quantum is larger than the share of heat energy allotted to that frequency, and thus no light is emitted at that frequency. The solution to this problem was found by Max Planck, who introduced the "quantum hypothesis" (giving the eventual theory its name) that the light could only be emitted in discrete chunks of energy, integer multiples of a small constant times the frequency of the light. That's clearly not happening (a good thing!) so something else must be going on. The problem with this is that there are a lot more ways to emit high-frequency light than low-frequency light, which suggests that rather than a pleasant warm res glow, your toaster should be spraying x-rays and gamma rays all over the kitchen. The fact that the light was independent of the composition suggested a simple universal approach: You tally up all the colors of light that an object might emit, and give each of them an equal share of the heat energy contained in the object.
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That sort of universal behavior drew in a lot of really bright physicists in the late 1800's, but none were able to crack the problem. The color of light emitted by a hot object is an example of the sort of simple, universal phenomenon that's catnip for theoretical physicists: no matter what an object is made of, if it can survive being heated to a given temperature, the spectrum of light it emits is exactly the same as for any other substance.
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Here are a few examples of things you probably run into in your everyday life without realizing that they're quantum: The universe as we know it runs on quantum rules, and while the classical physics that emerges when you apply quantum physics to enormously huge numbers of particles seem very different, there are lots of familiar, everyday phenomena that owe their existence to quantum effects. In fact, though, quantum physics is all around us. These things are exciting because they're exotic, but investigating them in the lab requires isolating very simple quantum systems, and it can be hard to see any connection between these phenomena and everyday life.
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This is largely a self-inflicted wound on the part of physicists and pop-science writers: when we talk about quantum physics, we usually emphasize the weird and counter-intuitive phenomena: Schrödinger's cat in a superposition of "alive" and "dead," Einstein's objection to God playing dice, the weird long-distance correlations of quantum entanglement. Quantum physics is arguably the greatest intellectual triumph in the history of human civilization, but to most people it seems like it's too remote and abstract to matter.