Morgan BellUsing a laser to show Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle at work
March 21st 2008 04:52
It's such a simple experiment, but it validates something so unintuitive about the Universe that people usually say 'well, that's funny...'
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle basically stated that we can never really know the location AND the momentum of a particle. Increasing the information about the position of the particle necessitates a lack of information of the momentum.
It doesn't really mean much in our macroscopic world, but this video shows exactly how the principle works, using a laser and a thin slit:
A brilliantly simple way of looking at it - when the slit is very small, we have some precision about the location of the photons exiting the slit... knowing this creates an uncertainty in the momentum of the photons, causing them to spread across the screen. This is not what we'd intuitively guess would happen!
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle basically stated that we can never really know the location AND the momentum of a particle. Increasing the information about the position of the particle necessitates a lack of information of the momentum.
It doesn't really mean much in our macroscopic world, but this video shows exactly how the principle works, using a laser and a thin slit:
A brilliantly simple way of looking at it - when the slit is very small, we have some precision about the location of the photons exiting the slit... knowing this creates an uncertainty in the momentum of the photons, causing them to spread across the screen. This is not what we'd intuitively guess would happen!
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