Heisenberg’s astrophysics prediction finally confirmed after 80 years
One of the most famous quantum physicists of all makes his mark in space, 80 years after first predicting it.
“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” -Werner Heisenberg
Discovering that our Universe was quantum in nature brought with it a lot of unintuitive consequences. The better you measured a particle’s position, the more fundamentally indeterminate its momentum was. The shorter an unstable particle lived, the less well-known its mass fundamentally was. Solid, material objects exhibit wave-like properties. And perhaps most puzzlingly of all, empty space — space that’s had all of its matter and radiation removed — isn’t empty, but is rather filled with virtual pairs of particles and antiparticles. 80 years ago, physicist Werner Heisenberg (who determined the two fundamental uncertainty relations), along with Hans Euler, predicted that because of these virtual particles, strong magnetic fields should affect how light propagates through a vacuum. Thanks to neutron star astronomy, that prediction has just been confirmed.
