A Quantum Century

Long before he became an iconic figure in Breaking Bad, Werner Heisenberg revolutionized physics with the publication of his landmark 1925 paper in Zeitschrift fur Physik. In a flurry of work from 1925-1927 by Heisenberg, Born, Jordan, Schrodinger, and Dirac, we suddenly had a mechanistic view of the world that was—probabilistic! This worldview (not endorsed by Albert Einstein who famously quipped “God does not play dice”) has been fantastically successful over the past century; it underpins all of physical science, and forms the basis for most modern technology. The weirdness of quantum mechanics will keep us busy for the next century with quantum computers, quantum sensors, and quantum information. We will review our quantum century, and what it portends for the future.