What is the Uncertainty Principle?
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle - in a nutshell! Tweet it - http://bit.ly/pagxNi Facebook it - http://on.fb.me/pzzfqM minutephysics is now on Google+ - http://bit.ly/qzEwc6 And...
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Quantum mechanics is weird, right? But did you know that some of its supposed peculiaritiesare not unique to quantum physics but are just properties of waves in general?Take the uncertainty principle - it says that the better we know where a particle is, theless we know about how fast it's going. There's a limit to how much we can know! But thisisn't just quantum weirdness - it happens all the time with normal everyday waves!Remember that the frequency of a wave is how close the wave crests are to each other - alow frequency wave doesn't have nearly as much oomph as a high frequency one!And the position of a wave is… well, where the wave is… mostly. So where exactly isa wave? It's spread out everywhere, right? Ok, but for a wave pulse...
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Quantum mechanics is weird, right? But did you know that some of its supposed peculiaritiesare not unique to quantum physics but are just properties of waves in general?Take the uncertainty principle - it says that the better we know where a particle is, theless we know about how fast it's going. There's a limit to how much we can know! But thisisn't just quantum weirdness - it happens all the time with normal everyday waves!Remember that the frequency of a wave is how close the wave crests are to each other - alow frequency wave doesn't have nearly as much oomph as a high frequency one!And the position of a wave is… well, where the wave is… mostly. So where exactly isa wave? It's spread out everywhere, right? Ok, but for a wave pulse...
