Hi, I'm I Refleto, and this is Science Friday. Today on the podcast, 100 years into quantum science,

and it's still really weird, but is the weirdness true? It's not that there are really

particles or really waves. They're really a third kind of thing that

has some characteristics of each. And that's not like anything we experience in the world around

us, which is why the whole theory seems strange.

A hundred years ago this summer, physicist Werner Heisenberg wrote a letter to Wolfgang

Pauly, and in it, he revealed

his new ideas about what would eventually be known as quantum theory. And 100 years later,

that theory has been expanded into a field of science that has revolutionized the way we look

at the world around us, from the ultra-small

to the ultra-big, from subatomic particles to the makeup of the universe. But it's still really

weird and often counterintuitive. Here to help us celebrate 100 years of quantum science

and separate quantum fact from science fiction is Dr. Chad

Herzl. He's the R. Gordon Gould, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy, also chair of the

Department at Union College in Good Old Schenectady, New York. Welcome to the program.

Thank you for having me on. Okay, 100 years, but what actually are we observing and

celebrating in detail? So Heisenberg is really kind of a late stage in the early development

of quantum. Really, it's in some senses the 125th anniversary of the kickoff, which was Max Planck in 1900,

who was desperately trying to explain the color of light from a hot object. And he had to

resort to this weird mathematical trick to make the equations work out, where he essentially

assigned an energy to the frequency of light.

And a few years later, Einstein picked that up and ran with it.

...