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Humanity had not realized the existence of this phenomenon because it happens only in the “micro-world,” in the world of things we cannot see with our eyes, of phenomena that do not appear in everyday life. The term quantum generates curiosity, a premonition of boredom, and even a great deal of extravagant nonsense, spoken as it is with the penetrating gaze of the savant, in an atmosphere of genius, applied to many things beyond its true scope.
It was not long before Planck proposed the quantization of energy, so that other quantum phenomena might be discovered experimentally and a theory be formulated. The theory is disconcerting when encountered for the first time, but once we have mastered it, it can be used in the development of new technology. One thing is for certain: in the course of more than a century now, the study of quantum physics has taken some great leaps forward. 1 D. Halliday, R. Resnick, and K. S. Krane, Physics, vol. 2 (John Wiley and Sons, 2002). 2 <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1918/summary/>
THE SMART DEC ADE Mauro Orozco Moreno He is a communicologist from Univa and a historian from the University of Guadalajara. His professional experience includes teaching, advertising and journalism. He is co-founder of the website Operación Gamer, in which since 2018 he is dedicated to video game journalism. He has collaborated with portals such as Level Up o XatakaMX.
We are living at a time when what we used to think of as “science fiction” is now the science we are familiar with every day. All those things that authors like Philip K. Dick (whose novel inspired the legendary motion picture Blade Runner) or William Hanna and Joseph Barbera (with The Jetsons) used to dream about (or, in some cases, fear), from the 1960s through the 1980s, we now see all around us in our everyday lives. Some of the common
electronic devices we use have fulfilled the dreams of Bruno Bianchi, when he created Inspector Gadget, except that they are contained in a smartphone, rather than a cyborg police detective. In the fields of science, medicine, and engineering, technology has progressed
GADGETS
But the quantization of energy is as if there were only squares of chocolate of exactly 500 calories. As if we could eat one square, or two, but never leave half of one, or a third, or any little bit of one. We could also eat ten, but only if we’re sure ingest them entirely, however cloying or unhealthy that may be! And the same applies to the production of the squares of chocolate: only whole squares could be produced in the factory, with no possibility of producing packages of half-squares. If the packaging says 500 calories, that’s what it has to be. In the end, a hundred squares might come out of the machine, or 261, or 593, or
as many as you choose, but they would all be whole squares, with no fractions. To return to energy, we can say it comes in whole squares or, to use the language of physics, in quanta. To put it another way, energy is quantized.
