by Chris Cumo

THIS YEAR MARKS the centennial of Max Planck's discovery that energy is not continuous but comes in discrete units called quanta. To borrow an analogy from mathematics, it is as though Planck proposed that all numbers consist only of integers with no continuum of fractions to link any two integers. A quantum of energy is so tiny that it can only describe the behavior of the innards of an atom. That is, quantum mechanics, the branch of physics that Planck began in 1900, operates only at the subatomic level, just as the adjunct lives only in the subacademic realm. She is neither listed in a college catalog nor invited to faculty social gatherings. Students cannot track her down at her office because she hasn't one. She sits on no committees and has no voice in university governance.

The world of quantum mechanics is a strange place, admits Brian Greene in The Elegant Universe. An electron has mass and so must be a particle, but if streams of them are fired through two narrow parallel slits, they imprint alternating dark and bright bands on a photographic plate, the hallmark of two waves either canceling out or reinforcing one another respectively.

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