The breathtaking achievement of quantum mechanic's founders was to develop a mathematical formalism that dispensed with the absolute predictions intrinsic to classical physics and instead predicted such probabilities. Working from an equation Schrodinger published in 1926 (and an equivalent though somewhat more awkward equation Heisenberg wrote down in 1925), physicists can input the details of how things are now, and then calculate the probability that they will be one way, or another, or another still, at any moment in the futures... the probabilistic predictions of quantum mechanics match experimental data. Always. In more than eighty years since these ideas were developed, there has not been a single verifiable experiment or astrophysical observation whose results conflict with quantum mechanical predictions. --Brian Greene (The Hidden Reality, pp.192-193)
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