ABSTRACT
Science has developed through a variety of investigations more or less over the time scale of human existence. On this scale, quantum mechanics is an extremely young field, existing essentially only about a century. Even our understanding of classical mechanics has existed for a comparatively long period—roughly having been formalized with Newton’s equations published in his Principia Mathematica, in April 1686. Up until the very end of the nineteenth century, mechanics in the form of Newton’s laws were comfortable, being understood and accepted by all who dealt with the motion of reasonable bodies. With the turn of the new century, however, mechanics would be shaken to its roots. The change began already on December 14, 1900, when Planck (1900) presented his new theory of black-body radiation to the German Physical Society, and this change would affect mechanics in physically small structures (and lead to quantum mechanics). Mechanics of large bodies would similarly be changed in 1905 with the arrival of Albert Einstein’s (1905a) relativity theory. In this book, we will deal with only the first of these two great breakthroughs.
