There have been many occasions in the past when things have been just too strange for people to accept, even in the face of overwhelming evedence or rigourous mathematical proof. It was not so many hundreds of years ago that the concept of a negative number was unknown - well when you think about it the idea of taking something away from nothing is quite odd. If you owed the bank money you didn't have a negative balance you had a positive debt. When you think about it there are very practical, everyday incidences where negative numbers are necessary.

This site is all about quantum mechanics, and quantum theory itself was just too strange for most people when it started. When Max Planck proposed the first ideas of quantisation in 1900, it was met with much skepticism - how can something which is a wave only come in discrete packets or 'quanta'?

It was not until Neils Bohr used Plancks ideas about quantisation to refine Rutherfords model of the atom did quantum theory take hold. Bohr's innovative use of quantum theory to explain the stability of atoms paved the way for the development of quantum mechanics right up to the present day.

This page has been created by Peter White, June 2001