He presented this idea in terms of a trade-off between the “error” of a position measurement (Δ x), owing to instrumental limitations, and the resulting “disturbance” in the momentum (Δ p). If less light is used, the less the momentum is perturbed but then the less clearly it can be “seen”. When light bounces off the particle, we can “see” and locate it, but at the expense of imparting energy and changing its momentum. He imagined a microscope that tries to image a particle like an electron. When Heisenberg proposed the principle in 1927, he offered a simple physical picture to help it make intuitive sense. The uncertainty principle says that the product of the uncertainties in position and momentum can be no smaller than a simple fraction of Planck’s constant h. The better we know one, the fuzzier the other becomes. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that we cannot measure certain pairs of variables for a quantum object – position and momentum, say – both with arbitrary accuracy. While several recent experiments suggest that the analogy is flawed, a team of physicists in the UK, Finland and Germany is now arguing that these experiments are not faithful to Heisenberg’s original formulation. The analogy was largely forgotten as quantum theory became more sophisticated but has enjoyed a revival over the past decade. What is the meaning of Heisenberg’s analogy? (Courtesy: German Federal Archives)Ī row has broken out among physicists over an analogy used by Werner Heisenberg in 1927 to make sense of his famous uncertainty principle.
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