I understand the math of the equation — mathematically speaking, the more certain you are of electron location, the less certain you are of velocity, and vice versa. But why? Do we know why this is a thing for electrons? Is here any hope of resolving this or does it appear to be an immutable characteristic of particle physics?
I’m tagging it Chemistry, because I’m primarily trying to understand it in terms of chemistry principles rather than physics principles because that’s how I need to apply it.
In: Physics
This is physics, and physics is all about your world view. We think of an electron as a little point particle with a certain electrical charge that orbits around a nucleus (and such things that mimic larger objects that we expect to be able to nail down where and how fast they are moving), which is perfectly acceptable if it helps you understand a problem. Or we think of electrons en-mass (where we have aggregate or bulk properties of many electrons, like electrons stuck in a capacitor). But those world views falls apart if you start looking closer (at single electrons), when the quantum world views start to dominate. Here an electron can behave like a wave (traveling at the speed of light) and/or a partical (look up dual slit experiment). If you want to know where the electron is in its orbit around a nucleus, you wont find it because it’s everywhere in it’s orbit (see probability clouds).
At quantum levels, particles are really described as probabilities or waves, which are subject to Heisenberg’s uncertanty principle (which is not exactly the same as the observer effect) because they are not actually particles.
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