An Intuitive Way to Understand Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle
A Simple Explanation for Everyday Thinkers
The uncertainty principle explains how closely probability is woven into the fabric of the quantum realm. To comprehend this, imagine two rooms, and every time you enter one, the decoration of the room next to it changes. As a result, when you enter a room, you will notice its decoration. You have no idea how the second room will look at this point. You then enter the second room. In doing so, you will have altered the appearance of the room you previously entered. As a result, you never know how both rooms look simultaneously.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is the same. Basically, the physical properties of the microscopic realm can be separated into two groups, A and B. Understanding a feature from section A fundamentally hinders our understanding of a feature from section B, and vice versa. The more precisely we understand a feature from one list, the less precisely we understand the comparable feature from the other list. As a result, Heisenberg’s Principle reveals the fundamental inability to determine simultaneously all traits from both lists (i.e., to determine with confidence all of these features from the microscopic realm).
For instance, the more precisely you know a particle’s location, the less precisely you know its speed. Similarly, the more precisely you know a particle’s speed, the less precisely you know where it is. Isn’t it intriguing? Quantum theory states that you can precisely compute certain physical properties of micro-particles, but you can’t precisely determine certain other complementary properties. For intuition, if you take a picture of a moving ball and show it to another individual, he or she will see it as if it were a picture of a stationary ball and will never be able to tell its velocity simply by looking at the picture.
To explain why the microscopic realm functions this way, we must follow a preliminary description developed by Heisenberg himself. When we measure an object’s position, we interact with it in some way. We see an object by receiving light that bounces off it and enters our eyes, conveying information about it. When light bounces off an item, it gives it a slight push. In our everyday macroscopic world, we might not see an object moving due to the influence of reflected light.
However, when it hits a tiny particle such as an electron, the electron’s speed changes. In fact, the more precisely we wish to know an electron’s position, the sharper and more powerful the light beam should be, resulting in an even larger effect on the electron’s motion. That means, if we precisely detect an electron’s position, we will contaminate our experiment by disturbing the electron’s velocity. Similarly, we can know an electron’s speed with high precision, but we must forfeit the electron’s precise position to do so.
In everyday conversation, we talk about things like a car going through a particular location at a certain speed. In truth, quantum mechanics says that such a statement is not true since we can’t measure a fixed position and a fixed speed at the same time. We can get away with such depictions of the physical world because the degree of uncertainty involved on everyday scales is so low that it goes unnoticed. A person fully obeying the rules of quantum mechanics would thus describe the car’s velocity as being between 45.99999999999999999999999999999999999 and 46.00000000000000000000000000000000001 kilometres per hour. But, if we replaced the massive car with an electron whose position we know within a micrometre, the uncertainty in its speed would be greater than 150,000 kilometres per hour!
Uncertainty is always present, but it becomes meaningful only at microscopic scales. It can also be deceiving because it gives the appearance that uncertainty occurs only when the awkward experimenters fiddle around. This is not the case. Uncertainty is embedded into the wave structure of quantum mechanics and exists whether or not we perform sloppy measurements. We can’t get away from it. Nature has built-in constraints on how much we can learn about microscopic worlds.
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