Heisenberg In Real Life
Chooky is in the midst of walking through his recent readings about quantum physics, and let me sum up by saying you will leave the end of this month slightly smarter and way way way more confused (as well as generally feeling in awe of the people who thought this stuff up). I'm only about half-way through and there are a couple of things that absolutely floored me when I read them.
The first was Einstein's thought experiment to work through a fact about light. Newton said that you cannot know that you are in motion without it being relative to something else. If you are flying at 500 miles an hour (relative to the Earth) and a ball is sitting in front of you also flying at 500 miles an hour, you will look at the ball and think you are both stationary unless you feel the wind on your face, see the ground, etc. Einstein then said, if I was traveling at the speed of light, and had a mirror next to me, the mirror would be black. This is because none of the light that left my face would go anywhere (it would all be stationary). THEREFORE, I would be able to tell I was traveling at the speed of light with no external reference. Therefore, you cannot travel at the speed of light OR the speed of light is not a constant OR you can tell what speed you are traveling at without an external reference point. One of these MUST be true! With one thought, Einstein unleashes a whole world of new physics. One little thought!
Second, Heisenberg declares that "(accuracy in momentum)*(accuracy in position) is less than a constant". You may know about the double slit experiment in physics, where streams of electrons are passed through a shrinking hole and then hit a wall where you can see their impact. When the hole gets small enough, the electrons behave like both a wave and a particle. The best part about this is that as you shrink the hole, the circle on the wall indicating where the electrons are hitting the wall first gets smaller (as you would expect) THEN larger THEN displays the Airy Pattern (as Chooky says, think bullseye). Getting smaller? I get it... the hole is getting smaller so it makes sense. Bullseye pattern? I get it... that's the point of the experiment, the electron(s) interfere to create the pattern. But getting larger in between? THAT'S the Heisenberg principle! Because you know the position to a greater degree, the momentum MUST increase. Because the momentum increases, they are dispersed over a larger area, creating the larger circle. Can you believe how insane this is? It's like you were staring at a baseball in flight through a pair of binoculars. As you began to focus the binoculars, the baseball began to stretch out into a blur so you couldn't tell if it was going really fast or going really slow. CRAZY!
The thing that floored me about both of these is how utterly simple it is once you understand the principles behind them. It just goes to show that even the most complicated things can be reduced to a simple example. In fact, if you cannot reduce a given problem, you're probably not thinking hard enough about it. And if the only way you can explain something is through an overly complex method, stop it. You don't fully understand it enough to teach it to someone else.
