Document Type

Course

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Physics 3710 – Introductory Modern Physics

Publication Date

8-28-2017

First Page

1

Last Page

5

Abstract

Quantum mechanics is money

Text message and take a picture with your smart phone; watch a movie on your Blu-ray player; get the bar code on your bag of chips scanned; obtain an MRI image of your aching shoulder; take a ride on a maglev train. None of these—and countless other—things would be possible without quantum mechanics! Leon Lederman, Nobel Prize winning physicist, is widely quoted as saying that 1/3 of the world’s economy is due to quantum mechanics. Lederman’s estimate is actually probably too low, but what surely is the case is that computers, lasers, and superconducting magnets (to cite a few examples), and all of the very familiar products that rely on them, could not exist in their present forms without knowledge of the quantum mechanics of electrons and photons. A poignant demonstration of this is found in the image to the right. The large crate being “uploaded” to the Pan Am plane is 5 MB of computer memory. The flash drive shown would be only a dot on the side of the crate yet contains 1 Tb of memory— equivalent to about 200,000 crates (and, in today’s dollars, 10 million times cheaper). This huge advance in computer technology is directly due to applied quantum mechanics.

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