Astrotales

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 Principle states that we cannot always assign an electron a position in space when describing it's velocity and vice versa. In practice this means that the closer we get to knowing where an electron is the less we know about it's speed and the more we know about it's speed the less we know about it's position.

This is an outrageous proposition after Neils Bohr (with whom Heisenberg had studied) had drawn the orbits of electrons neatly around the nucleus of the atom like so many 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 described the physical world in much more mystical terms that set the stage for such scientific conundrums like quarks, charm, and anti-matter. For Heisenberg's Principle told scientists that it is the observer as much as the observed that reveals Reality.