The energy quanta occured in 1900 in works of Max Planck (Nobel prize,
1918) on the black body electromagnetic radiation. Planck’s “quanta of
light” have been used by Einstein (Nobel prize, 1921) to explain the photoelectric effect, but the first “quantization” of a quantity having units of
action (the angular momentum) belongs to Niels Bohr (Nobel Prize, 1922).
This opened the road to the universality of quanta, since the action is the
basic functional to describe any type of motion. However, only in the 1920’s
the formalism of quantum mechanics has been developed in a systematic
manner and the remarkable works of that decade contributed in a decisive
way to the rising of quantum mechanics at the level of fundamental theory
of the universe from the mankind standpoint and one of the most successful
from the point of view of technology. Moreover, it is quite probable that
many of the cosmological misteries may be disentangled by means of various
quantization procedures of the gravitational field leading to our progress in
understanding the origins of the universe. On the other hand, in recent
years, there is a strong surge of activity in the information aspect of quantum mechanics, that has not been very much exploited in the past, aiming
at a very attractive “quantum computer” technology.
At the philosophical level, the famous paradoxes of