What is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle?

In the real physical world around us, it's very easy to look at a moving object and estimate where it's going to be in the next few seconds. This happens because the uncertainties in the speed and position of the object are so small that we can detect them.

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is one of a handful of ideas from quantum physics to expand into general pop culture. It says that you can never simultaneously know the exact position and the exact speed of an object and shows up as a metaphor in everything from literary criticism to sports commentary.Uncertainty is often explained as a result of measurement that the act of measuring an object 's position changes its speed or vice-versa. The real origin is much deeper and more amazing. The uncertainty principle exists because everything in the universe behaves like both particles and waves at the same time.

In quantum mechanics, the exact position and exact speed of an object have no meaning. To understand this, we need to think about what it means to behave like a particle or a wave. particles by definition exist in a single place at any instant in time.We can represent this by a graph showing the probability of finding the object in a particular place, which looks like a spike 100 percent at one specific position and zero everywhere else.

waves on the other hand are disturbances spread out in space like ripples covering the surface of a pond. We can clearly identify features of the wave pattern as a whole. Most importantly, its wavelength, which is the distance between two neighboring peaks or two neighboring valleys.But we can't assign it to a single position. It has a good probability of being in lots of different places.wavelength is essential for quantum physics because an object 's wavelength is related to its momentum, mass time velocity.

A fast moving object has lots of momentum, which corresponds to a very short wavelength.

A heavy object has lots of momentum even if it's not moving very fast, which means a very short wavelength.

This is why we don't notice the wave nature in everyday objects. If you toss a baseball up in the air, its wavelength is billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a meter far too tiny to ever detect.Small things like atoms or electrons through can have wavelengths big enough to be measured in physics experiments. So, if we have a pure wave, we can measure its wavelength and it has no position. We can know a particle's position very well, but it doesn't have a wavelength, we don't know its momentum.To get particles with both position and momentum, we mix two to make a graph that has waves but only in a small area.

How can we do this? by combining waves with different wavelengths, which means giving our quantum object some possibility of having different moments. When we add two waves, we find that there are places where the peaks line up making a bigger wave and other places where the peaks of one fill in the valleys of the other.The result has regions where we see waves separated by regions of nothing at all. If we add a third wave, the regions where the waves cancel out get bigger or fourth and they get bigger still with the waiver regions becoming narrower.If we keep adding waves, we can make a wave packet with a clear wavelength in one small region. That's a quantum object with both wave and particle nature, but to accomplish this we had to lose certainty about both position and momentum. The position isn't restricted to a single point.

There's a good probability of finding it within some range of the center of the wave packet and we made the wave packet by adding lots of waves, which means there's some probability of finding it with the momentum corresponding to any of those. Both position and momentum are uncertain and the uncertainties are connected.

If you want to reduce the position uncertainty by making a smaller wave packet, you need to add more waves, which means a bigger momentum uncertainty.

If you want to know the momentum better, you need a bigger wave packet, which means a bigger position uncertainty.

That's the Heisenberg principle first stated by German physicist Werner Heisenberg back in 1927. The uncertainty principle isn't just a practical limit on measurement. It's a limit on what properties an object can have built into the fundamental structure of the universe itself.

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