Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Why, exactly, can you not know both the velocity and position of a particle?

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Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Why, exactly, can you not know both the velocity and position of a particle?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Imagine you hear a sound.

Say that sound was a clap. You know very well when it happened, but you probably can’t tell what its pitch was.

Now imagine a long note being played by a flute. You know quite precisely how high its pitch is, but it’s not confined to a definite point in time.

A better way to phrase the “uncertainty” which is rather misleading to laypeople would be to say that waves that last a short period of time correspond to many possible frequencies, while waves with definite frequencies necessarily spread out over longer periods of time.

I know I’m talking about waves here but the same principle applies to particles.

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