Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything

by Michio Kaku

By comparing the resonances predicted by Schrödinger’s waves with actual elements, one found a remarkable one-to-one correspondence. Physicists, who for decades were stumped trying to understand the atom, were now able to peek inside the atom itself. When one compared these wave patterns to the hundred or so chemical elements found in nature by Dmitri Mendeleev and others, one could explain the chemical properties of the elements using pure mathematics. This was a staggering achievement. Physicist Paul Dirac would write prophetically: “The fundamental laws necessary for the mathematical treatment of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty lies only in the fact that application of these laws leads to equations that are too complex to be solved.”