ABSTRACT
There are four fundamental forces in nature: gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear. Of these four forces, gravity is the first to be discovered and the least understood. Although we have a good understanding of the behavior of the gravitational force on a large scale, i.e., as applied to celestial bodies, when we try to unravel the mysteries of this force in the domain of the atoms and subatomic particles, we fail. This failure manifests itself most clearly in the attempts to reconcile gravity with the theory that most successfully describes the behavior of the subatomic world, the quantum theory. The process of reconciling a classically observed force with the quantum theory is called quantization. It has been possible to reconcile electromagnetism with the quantum theory with great success (as Chapter 32 testifies), so we say that electromagnetism has been quantized.
