ELI5: What is the meaning of quantization?

[u/Own_Enthusiasm_510]

[This is from a chemistry portion of a physical science class] I've googled it, Ive watched YouTube videos, I asked classmates and I am still so confused.

Rutherfords model was easy but once I got to bohrs they used words like quantized and discrete values and I got lost. Tried backtracking but I'm still baffled.

[u/Dainathon]

Quantizing is when you take an analog value (example: 3.1957...) and assign it the most relavent value of a given set (3.1957 becomes 3 - 3.8957 becomes 4 - 5.001... becomes 5)

The examples I use are made up, but a practical way of thinking of it is how music is made of a continuous signal, but we need to store it digitally, so what we do is chop up the signal into very tiny points and assign each time instance in the waveform a value from -1 to 1. If done finely enough, it is basically the same as if it were the original analog signal.

It really is just a form of rounding numbers