Jan 21
4, Uncertainty
“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”
— Werner Heisenberg.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that there exists some limit to the information gain from a system (the system can denote a particle). This maxim of nature (or rather our perception of it) has an apparent see-saw trade-off in the precision between conjugate quantities:
“The more precise the measurement of position, the more imprecise the measurement of momentum, and vice versa.”
— Werner Heisenberg.
I consider this uncertainty principle, in itself, to be a conjugate to the wave-particle duality which posits a dimorphism of behaviour;
where particles exhibit wave behaviour (and vice versa) that collapse upon observation.
“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”
— Werner Heisenberg.
A symphony can be decomposed into a sum of frequencies from each instrument of the orchestra. Brass, strings and percussion instruments; units of harmonies culminating along scale into one congruent construct.
That orchestral decomposition (or summation) has a flavour evocative of the Fourier transform. I am particularly fond of this branch of mathematics as a tool that pools virtually all systems into a trigonometric relationship. With the Fourier series any function can be represented as an infinite series of sines and/or cosines (waves). Everything is music or rather music smoothly abstracts to the same math underpinning everything. A paraphrase of the de Broglie hypothesis springs to mind,
“..any particle of matter that has linear momentum is also a wave.”
— Louis de Broglie.
