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Most commonly, quanta are the fundamental units of something measurable. Electromagnetic energy, for example, is quantized into photons, wavelike packets of fixed frequency. Quantum physics was founded at the beginning of the twentieth century, incorporating at a foundational level the idea that electromagnetic radiation comes in such packets; the concepts of quantum theory have proved paradoxical, and difficult to articulate in any familiar terms, but the theory built up into quantum field theory was the largest single step in the physical sciences between 1900 and 1950.

1 Etymology

The word quantum comes from the Latin word for "quantity".

2 See also

• Quantum mechanics
• Quantum state
• Quantum number
• Quantum cryptography
• Quantum electronicsQuantum electronics is an area of physics dealing with the effect of quantum mechanics on the behaviour of electrons in solid-state matter. It is today rarely considered a subfield in its own right, as it has been absorbed by other fields: Solid-state phy
• Quantum computing
• Magnetic flux quantumThe magnetic flux quantum Φ is the quantum of magnetic flux passing through a superconductor. The inverse of the flux quantum, 1/Φ, is called the Josephson constant and is denoted K''. It is a property of a supercurrent (superconducting electrical
• QuantizationGenerally, quantization is the state of being constrained to a set of discrete values, rather than varying continuously. In signal processing, quantization is the process of approximating a continuous signal by a set of discrete symbols or integer values.