 Well actually, there's a whole universe of difference between classical physics and quantum physics. Newton's book 'Principia' was a very bold shot at explaining our universe. He was the founding father of classical physics (along with a few others). Classical physics gave us all those essential laws in science, to name a couple; the conservation of energy, laws of thermodynamics...etc. Ofcourse as with every great scientist, some of Newton's theories were later proved incorrect, mainly due to the emergance of quantum physics. A major difference between classical and quantum is the fact that classical physics wanted to explain all radiation in waves where as the first quantum theories explained them in quantas(meaning an unknown mass). Radiation was emitted in chunks rather than waves according to quantum theory. Classical physics was so firmly established in the science world by the 19th century, so it took a great deal of influence and brain power to shift scientists' minds. Max Planck himself had placed the first stones of quantum physics but surprisingly he spent his whole life trying to disprove his own theory as he believed it was inconsistent. |
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During the late 19th century, inconsistencies started to appear in classical physics. The first one was the Michelson-Morley experiment when they tried to test ether wind and the movement of Earth. The experiment, no matter how many times it was repeated, showed that there was no connection between 'ether' and light. The second hole was the famous Ultraviolet catastrophe. It would take a few pages to explain but it was simply to do with the light that's produced from heating elements. This experiment encountered a problem when trying to explain black body radiation. A black body absorbs all radiation that it comes into contact with. When an object is in thermodynamic equilibrium, it absorbs as much as it radiates, at every wavelength so it doesn't change in temperature or any other way. So a black body is said to be in thermodynamic equilibrium if it absorbs the same amount of light that it radiates. The problem is that classical physics has always explained radiation in terms of waves, using the same principles which describes sound waves, which then means that only the brightness of light should change with temperature, not the colour. In the ultraviolet catastrophe, the classical wave theory predicted that the majority of radiation emitted from a black body would be high frequency. In cases where classical physics predicted lots of ultraviolet rays, there were none. This was the catastrophe for classical physics. Only when Max Planck developed the first quantum theory of radiation at the end of the nineteenth century, could this be explained. These flaws in classical physics soon resulted in a paradigm shift to the way we think of physics! |
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