At the smallest scales, the universe behaves very differently than the everyday world we observe around us. Quantum mechanics is the subfield of physics that describes this bizarre behavior of microscopic particles — atoms, electrons, photons and almost everything else in the molecular and submolecular realm.
Developed during the first half of the 20th century, the results of quantum mechanics are often extremely strange and counterintuitive. However, studying them has allowed physicists to reach a greater understanding about the nature of the universe, and could one day change the way we as humans process information.
