Astronomical Tales

What's uncertain in Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle?

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is one of those concepts in modern quantum physics that truly boggles the mind. Specifically, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that we cannot always assign an electron a position in space when describing its velocity and vice versa. In practice this means that the closer we get to knowing where an electron is the less we know about its speed, and the more we know about its speed the less we know about its position.

What's constant about the Hubble Constant?
the answer

This seems an outrageous proposition after the scientist Neils Bohr had drawn the orbits of electrons neatly around the nucleus of the atom like planets revolving around a sun. With this basic notion neatly shattered, the structure of the atom became much more mysterious, ineffable, and harder to objectify and linearly define.

The era of quantum physics that Heisenberg so effectively helped to usher in describes the physical world in much more mystical terms that set the stage for such scientific conundrums like quarks, strings, and anti-matter. For Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle told scientists that it is the observer as much as the observed that reveals reality.

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