It's professor Dave. Let's learn about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Explain once Schrodinger and Planck had sufficiently developed the brand-new field of quantum mechanics, some perplexing implications arose. For one, in classical mechanics, an object will have a precise value for its position and momentum at all times. In quantum mechanics, this was no longer the case. If a quantum particle were to have precise values for position and momentum, it would simply be a particle. But all particles are also waves, so this kind of determinism no longer applies. Instead, as we saw with the Schrodinger equation, the quantum realm is probabilistic in nature. - This brought about the issue of how to describe the position and momentum of the electron. Under the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, an electron simply does not possess precise values for both of these parameters at the same time. So when we take a measurement, the result is randomly drawn from a probability distribution. An electron will seem to be in a particular location if and only if we measure its location. However, if we know its location, we can no longer know its precise momentum or what it's doing. This notion is summarized in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. - This states that when looking at complementary variables like position and momentum, the more precisely one parameter is known, the less we know about the other. Here Delta X represents the uncertainty in position while Delta P is the uncertainty in momentum. Their product must be greater than H over 4pi. If the uncertainty in one parameter decreases, the uncertainty in the other must increase. And if one becomes known with total certainty, the other becomes unknowable. - The important thing to realize is that this has nothing to do with our measuring instruments....