Wednesday 17 July 2019

What is the uncertainty principle?


I looked on Wikpedia for information on the uncertainty principle, but after reading it I still had no idea. I know it has something to do with how many things you can hold at some spot for some amount of time (maybe?). This is inspired by this question.



Answer



In classical physics you are supposed to be able to measure the coordinates and the velocity (really the momentum) of a mass with infinite precision at the same time. If you try this trick in the lab you notice that that's not the case. Either your position or your momentum measurement or both will always show some non-trivial statistical fluctuations when you repeat your experiment many times. If you multiply the standard deviations of these fluctuations with each other, no experiment that you can ever perform yields a product that is smaller than a certain number. That is it.



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