Scientist and explorers such as Odysseus and Marco Polo and Columbus returned home as changed men. A German physicist Max Planck, had proposed that matter and radiation are not absolutely continuous. Planck concluded that the energy in all electromagnetic waves exist in the form of tiny, discrete amounts, or quanta. In 1900 Plank published his conclusions, which applied to heat, light, and radio waves. In 1905 Einstein seconded this insight, affirming that light could be understood as a collection of discrete quanta later dubbed "photons." Werner Heisenberg seemed to prove Bohr's picture of particles leaping from fixed orbit with a series of complex equation. "Heisenberg showed that we can never know everything about the behavior of even one particle, much less myriad's of them, and, therefore, can never make predictions about the future, that will be completely accurate in every detail." "This marked a fundamental change in the world view of physics. It revealed that not only matter and energy but knowledge itself is quantized. "A few physicists became so frustrated that they quit science altogether." "It was turmoil and confusion and not calm assurance that marked the growth of the mind, and when the dust began to clear, quantum physics emerged as not only a vital and rapidly developing field of science, but as one of the greatest intellectual achievements in the history of human thought.
Rumors of perfection. "Paul Dirac, the English theoretical physicist whose relativistic, quantum mechanical description of the electron ranks with the master pieces of Einstein and Bohr, went so far as to maintain that that it is more important to have beauty in ones equations than to have them fit experiment. Symmetry is the state in which one part exactly corresponds to another in size, shape, and position, the result balance or beauty. "Symmetry is a venerable concept, with many implications in both science and art.
