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Friday, February 29, 2008

The Heisenberg principle of uncertainty

Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) was one of the inventors of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg was the leader of Hitler's atomic bomb project during World War II. After the war, he claimed that he had deliberately sabotaged the Nazi bomb effort. Heisenberg was an astonishing physicist. After World War II, he admitted to sabotaging the success of the atomic bomb for Germany. If he did indeed sabotage the bomb, it may have drastically altered the outcome of the war and history as we know it. However, the validity of his confession is a bit sketchy in that why would he sabotage the sabotage something that he dedicated years of blood, sweat, tears, and research to for the enemy? He announced his "uncertainty principle" at age 26. The Heisenberg is also known as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle or Indeterminacy principle. No matter how autodidactic a person is, it takes a superior mind to read between the lines of Heisenberg's mathematical non sequiturs.
"I have tried several times to read and although I think I understand quantum mechanics, I have never understood Heisenberg's motivations for the mathematical steps ..." acknowledged the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg.
According to physist Thomson Gale, The Uncertainty principle is a fundamental postulate of quantum theory used to describe the behavior of energy and matter on atomic and subatomic scale that states that two complementary properties of a system (i.e., the position and momentum of an electron) can never both be measured exactly. In this regard the Uncertainty principle established a limit to the accuracy of measurement. Moreover, the Uncertainty principle specifies that the measurement of a system alters the system.
The affect of the Heisenberg Principle is the increasing of accuracy on measurements of an observable quantity, thereby amplifying the uncertainty with which another conjugate amount may be recognized.

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