History of quantum field theory
The third thread in the development of quantum field theory was the need to handle the statistics of many-particle systems consistently and with ease. In 1927, Pascual Jordan tried to extend the canonical quantization of fields to the many-body wave functions of identical particles using a formalism which is known as statistical transformation theory; this procedure is now sometimes called second quantization. In 1928, Jordan and Eugene Wigner found that the quantum field describing electrons, or other fermions, had to be expanded using anti-commuting creation and annihilation operators due to the Pauli exclusion principle (see Jordan–Wigner transformation). This thread of development was incorporated into many-body theory and strongly influenced condensed matter physics and nuclear physics.
Quantum mechanics
Following Max Planck's solution in 1900 to the black-body radiation problem (reported 1859), Albert Einstein offered a quantum-based theory to explain the photoelectric effect (1905, reported 1887). Around 1900–1910, the atomic theory and the corpuscular theory of light first came to be widely accepted as scientific fact; these latter theories can be viewed as quantum theories of matter and electromagnetic radiation, respectively.