Quantum physicists like Henri Poincare and Werner Heisenberg studied the behavior of matter and energy at the atomic level and below and they discovered that, first of all, the distinctions that Newtonian physics made between matter and energy are not a clear as was once thought and,secondly, that something happened with electrons that was completely unexpected. Electrons did not traverse all the points between energy levels when they changed energy levels. The shift from one level to another is not “continuous.” This was the discovery of discontinuity.
In everyday speech, you sometimes hear people use the term “quantum leap.” It usually refers to a dramatic premise change, often in a discussion or argument. “You just made a quantum leap from one story about climate change to a conclusion that it doesn’t exist.” The term “quantum leap” is borrowed from quantum physics, and its popularization doesn’t do justice to what the term actually means. In physics this leap – using electron energy levels again – can be described as a person walking across a pond on stepping stones. We imagine the person (electron) stepping from one stepping stone (energy level) to the next. But what happens with real electrons is astonishing. The person doesn’t cross the distance between the stones. She disappears from one stone and simultaneously appears on the next, never passing through the space between the stones. This is the quantum leap, or discontinuity.
This idea was very controversial when it appeared at the first part of the 20th Century, because it undermined an idea of the physical universe as somehow mechanical, as a giant clockwork or machine that had a vast series of perfectly predictable causes and effects. Suddenly, there was this seemingly magical phenomenon that was routinely happening at the very subatomic basis of existence. Much philosophy was based on these presumptions, and therefore even ideas about psychology, society and politics were taking their cues from Newtonian assumptions. Following on the idea of discontinuity were the principles of uncertainty (Heisenberg) and even the idea of chaos (Poincare and Edward Lorenz). The physical universe, it appeared, is creative.
Discontinuity has been seized by subcultures as a justification for certain beliefs that do not necessarily follow from discontinuity in physics, and any scientific idea can be plugged into analogies that may prove faulty. New age philosophies that have long employed the term “energy” in a very amorphous way may have felt constrained by the demand for almost mechanical proof that skeptics demanded, without making any real connection between their beliefs and discontinuity as it is understood by physicists.