The uncertainty principle lies in the plane of quantum mechanics, but in order to fully analyze it, let's turn to the development of physics as a whole. Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein are perhaps the most famous physicists in the history of mankind. The first at the end of the 17th century formulated the laws of classical mechanics, to which all the bodies surrounding us, the planets, subject to inertia and gravity, obey. The development of the laws of classical mechanics led the scientific world towards the end of the 19th century to the opinion that all the basic laws of nature had already been discovered, and man could explain any phenomenon in the Universe.
Einstein's theory of relativity
As it turned out, at that time only the tip of the iceberg was discovered, further research threw scientists new, completely incredible facts. So, at the beginning of the 20th century, it was discovered that the propagation of light (which has a final speed of 300,000 km / s) does not obey the laws of Newtonian mechanics in any way. According to the formulas of Isaac Newton, if a body or a wave is emitted by a moving source, its speed will be equal to the sum of the speed of the source and its own. However, the wave properties of the particles were of a different nature. Numerous experiments with them have shown thatin electrodynamics, a young science at that time, a completely different set of rules works. Even then, Albert Einstein, together with the German theoretical physicist Max Planck, introduced their famous theory of relativity, which describes the behavior of photons. However, for us now it is not so much its essence that is important, but the fact that at that moment the fundamental incompatibility of the two areas of physics was revealed, to combine
which, by the way, scientists are trying to this day.
The birth of quantum mechanics
The study of the structure of atoms finally destroyed the myth of comprehensive classical mechanics. Experiments by Ernest Rutherford in 1911 showed that the atom is composed of even smaller particles (called protons, neutrons and electrons). Moreover, they also refused to interact according to Newton's laws. The study of these smallest particles gave rise to new postulates of quantum mechanics for the scientific world. Thus, perhaps the ultimate understanding of the Universe lies not only and not so much in the study of stars, but in the study of the smallest particles, which give an interesting picture of the world at the micro level.
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
In the 1920s, quantum mechanics took its first steps, and scientists only
realized what follows from it for us. In 1927, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg formulated his famous uncertainty principle, which demonstrates one of the main differences between the microcosm and the environment we are used to. It consists in the fact that it is impossible to simultaneously measure the speed and spatial position of a quantum object, just because we influence it during the measurement, because the measurement itself is also carried out with the help of quanta. If it is quite banal: when evaluating an object in the macrocosm, we see the light reflected from it and, on the basis of this, we draw conclusions about it. But in quantum physics, the impact of light photons (or other measurement derivatives) already affects the object. Thus, the uncertainty principle caused understandable difficulties in studying and predicting the behavior of quantum particles. At the same time, interestingly, it is possible to measure separately the speed or separately the position of the body. But if we measure simultaneously, then the higher our speed data, the less we will know about the actual position, and vice versa.
