Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics relating to the very small.

It results in what may appear to be some very strange conclusions about the
physical world. At the scale of atoms and electrons, many of the equations
of classical mechanics, which describe how things move at everyday sizes and
speeds, cease to be useful. In classical mechanics, objects exist in a specific place
at a specific time. However, in quantum mechanics, objects instead exist in a haze of
probability; they have a certain chance of being at point A, another chance of being
at point B and so on.
Three revolutionary principles
Quantum mechanics (QM) developed over many decades, beginning as a set of
controversial mathematical explanations of experiments that the math of classical
mechanics could not explain. It began at the turn of the 20th century, around the
same time that Albert Einstein published his theory of relativity, a separate
mathematical revolution in physics that describes the motion of things at high
speeds. Unlike relativity, however, the origins of QM cannot be attributed to any one
scientist. Rather, multiple scientists contributed to a foundation of three revolutionary
principles that gradually gained acceptance and experimental verification between
1900 and 1930. They are:
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Quantized properties: Certain properties, such as position, speed and color, can
sometimes only occur in specific, set amounts, much like a dial that "clicks" from
number to number. This challenged a fundamental assumption of classical
mechanics, which said that such properties should exist on a smooth, continuous
spectrum. To describe the idea that some properties "clicked" like a dial with specific
settings, scientists coined the word "quantized."
Particles of light: Light can sometimes behave as a particle. This was initially met
with harsh criticism, as it ran contrary to 200 years of experiments showing that light
behaved as a wave; much like ripples on the surface of a calm lake. Light behaves
similarly in that it bounces off walls and bends around corners, and that the crests
and troughs of the wave can add up or cancel out. Added wave crests result in
brighter light, while waves that cancel out produce darkness. A light source can be
thought of as a ball on a stick being rhythmically dipped in the center of a lake. The
color emitted corresponds to the distance between the crests, which is determined
by the speed of the ball's rhythm. 
Waves of matter: Matter can also behave as a wave. This ran counter to the roughly
30 years of experiments showing that matter (such as electrons) exists as particles.
Quantized properties?
In 1900, German physicist Max Planck sought to explain the distribution of colors
emitted over the spectrum in the glow of red-hot and white-hot objects, such as light-
bulb filaments. When making physical sense of the equation he had derived to
describe this distribution, Planck realized it implied that combinations of only
certain colors (albeit a great number of them) were emitted, specifically those that
were whole-number multiples of some base value. Somehow, colors were quantized!
This was unexpected because light was understood to act as a wave, meaning that
values of color should be a continuous spectrum. What could be
forbidding atoms from producing the colors between these whole-number multiples?
This seemed so strange that Planck regarded quantization as nothing more than a
mathematical trick. According to Helge Kragh in his 2000 article in Physics World
magazine, "Max Planck, the Reluctant Revolutionary," "If a revolution occurred in
physics in December 1900, nobody seemed to notice it. Planck was no exception
…" 
Planck's equation also contained a number that would later become very important
to future development of QM; today, it's known as "Planck's Constant."

Quantization helped to explain other mysteries of physics. In 1907, Einstein used

Since the early 1800s, the science of spectroscopy had shown that different elements
emit and absorb specific colors of light called "spectral lines." Though spectroscopy
was a reliable method for determining the elements contained in objects such as
distant stars, scientists were puzzled about why each element gave off those specific
lines in the first place. In 1888, Johannes Rydberg derived an equation that
described the spectral lines emitted by hydrogen, though nobody could explain why
the equation worked. This changed in 1913 when Niels Bohr applied Planck's
hypothesis of quantization to Ernest Rutherford's 1911 "planetary" model of the
atom, which postulated that electrons orbited the nucleus the same way that planets
orbit the sun. According to Physics 2000 (a site from the University of Colorado), Bohr
proposed that electrons were restricted to "special" orbits around an atom's nucleus.
They could "jump" between special orbits, and the energy produced by the jump
caused specific colors of light, observed as spectral lines. Though quantized
properties were invented as but a mere mathematical trick, they explained so much
that they became the founding principle of QM.
Particles of light?
In 1905, Einstein published a paper, "Concerning an Heuristic Point of View Toward the
Emission and Transformation of Light," in which he envisioned light traveling not as a
wave, but as some manner of "energy quanta." This packet of energy, Einstein
suggested, could "be absorbed or generated only as a whole," specifically when an
atom "jumps" between quantized vibration rates. This would also apply, as would be
shown a few years later, when an electron "jumps" between quantized orbits. Under
this model, Einstein's "energy quanta" contained the energy difference of the jump;
when divided by Planck’s constant, that energy difference determined the color of
light carried by those quanta. 
With this new way to envision light, Einstein offered insights into the behavior of nine
different phenomena, including the specific colors that Planck described being
emitted from a light-bulb filament. It also explained how certain colors of light could
eject electrons off metal surfaces, a phenomenon known as the "photoelectric
effect." However, Einstein wasn't wholly justified in taking this leap, said Stephen
Klassen, an associate professor of physics at the University of Winnipeg. In a 2008
paper, "The Photoelectric Effect: Rehabilitating the Story for the Physics Classroom,"
Klassen states that Einstein's energy quanta aren't necessary for explaining all of
those nine phenomena. Certain mathematical treatments of light as a wave are still
capable of describing both the specific colors that Planck described being emitted
from a light-bulb filament and the photoelectric effect. Indeed, in Einstein's
controversial winning of the 1921 Nobel Prize, the Nobel committee only
acknowledged "his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect," which specifically
did not rely on the notion of energy quanta.
Roughly two decades after Einstein's paper, the term "photon" was popularized for
describing energy quanta, thanks to the 1923 work of Arthur Compton, who showed
that light scattered by an electron beam changed in color. This showed that particles
of light (photons) were indeed colliding with particles of matter (electrons), thus
confirming Einstein's hypothesis. By now, it was clear that light could behave both as
a wave and a particle, placing light's "wave-particle duality" into the foundation of
QM.
Waves of matter?
Since the discovery of the electron in 1896, evidence that all matter existed in the
form of particles was slowly building. Still, the demonstration of light's wave-particle
duality made scientists question whether matter was limited to acting only as
particles. Perhaps wave-particle duality could ring true for matter as well? The first
scientist to make substantial headway with this reasoning was a French physicist
named Louis de Broglie. In 1924, de Broglie used the equations of Einstein's theory
of special relativity to show that particles can exhibit wave-like characteristics, and
that waves can exhibit particle-like characteristics. Then in 1925, two scientists,
working independently and using separate lines of mathematical thinking, applied de
Broglie's reasoning to explain how electrons whizzed around in atoms (a
phenomenon that was unexplainable using the equations of classical mechanics). In
Germany, physicist Werner Heisenberg (teaming with Max Born and Pascual
Jordan) accomplished this by developing "matrix mechanics." Austrian physicist
Erwin Schrödinger developed a similar theory called "wave mechanics." Schrödinger
showed in 1926 that these two approaches were equivalent (though Swiss physicist
Wolfgang Pauli sent an unpublished result to Jordan showing that matrix mechanics
was more complete).
The Heisenberg-Schrödinger model of the atom, in which each electron acts as a
wave (sometimes referred to as a "cloud") around the nucleus of an atom replaced
the Rutherford-Bohr model. One stipulation of the new model was that the ends of
the wave that forms an electron must meet. In "Quantum Mechanics in Chemistry, 3rd
Ed." (W.A. Benjamin, 1981), Melvin Hanna writes, "The imposition of the boundary
conditions has restricted the energy to discrete values." A consequence of this
stipulation is that only whole numbers of crests and troughs are allowed, which
explains why some properties are quantized. In the Heisenberg-Schrödinger model
of the atom, electrons obey a "wave function" and occupy "orbitals" rather than
orbits. Unlike the circular orbits of