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Why energies are quantized at quantum scale? Apart from quantum mechanical calculations, how you will accept that energies are quantized?

Qmechanic
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Stacy arora
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    Evidences like Black body radiation, hydrogen spectral lines? – KP99 Aug 30 '21 at 13:51
  • I highly recommend the old but still relevant paper by Sir Neville Mott: Mott, S.N., 1964. On teaching quantum phenomena. Contemporary Physics, 5(6), pp.401-418.. It includes plenty of examples beyond those of @KP99 for the evidence of quantization. – ZeroTheHero Aug 30 '21 at 14:52
  • Possible duplicate: https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/39208/2451 – Qmechanic Aug 30 '21 at 14:53
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    ... not sure why this was downvoted. It seems a perfectly legitimate question, although possibly a duplicate. – ZeroTheHero Aug 30 '21 at 14:54
  • @ZeroTheHero yeah it seems a legitimate question, gave an upvote (+1) but its closed anyway – KP99 Aug 30 '21 at 15:12
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    I think there is a difference between the two terms "discreteness" and "Quantization". – Stacy arora Aug 30 '21 at 19:45
  • @Stacyarora found a related post : https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/206790/difference-between-discretization-and-quantization-in-physics – KP99 Aug 30 '21 at 20:56

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Why is always hard to answer. Here’s Feynman charmingly explaining the same. Because to answer why, one must agree upon a framework (the axioms) from which to build the argument to answer.

The beauty of science is however, we always rely on nature. After all nature is what we are trying to describe. So no matter what our theories describe, at the end of the day what we must accept is what nature tells us.

And what nature tells us is that energy is quantised. One of the earliest triumphs of the quantum theories was Neils Bohr’s model of the hydrogen atom correctly describing the discrete lines of the hydrogen spectrum (Balmer series, Lyman series and so on) which had been an open problem for over two decades at that point.

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Here’s the observed hydrogen spectrum. What this describes is the energy emitted/absorbed by hydrogen atoms. It’s clearly discrete. And that’s all (among other confirming evidence) it takes us to convince that the energy levels are quantised.

Superfast Jellyfish
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