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
You can’t understand it with chemistry alone, because it’s physics, plain and simple. Chemistry is physics too, but at the slightly higher scale of interacting atoms.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal is a property of waves and wave pulses. Anything that has wave properties will have a similar phenomenon electrons included.
Imagine that you have a perfectly periodic wave. You know the ~~amplitude~~ frequency, not sure why I said amplitude (energy/momentum) exactly, however, there’s no information about the location of your wave, as it exists along the entire line.
Now imagine the reverse, you have a single, infinite peak at your origin. You now know exactly where your wave pulse is, but no information about the energy.
Then, you can smoothly transition between these two extremes, and you’ll find a tradeoff between how much you know about position and momentum, or time and energy, or other Heisenberg relations.
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