Uncertainty Principle

Heisenberg’s Universe

“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”― Werner Heisenberg

As Heisenberg said, the universe we look at is the universe we see, and quantum mechanics actually made us realize how wrong we were in our view of this universe: a whole new universe of understanding, possibilities, and uncertainties.

In 1926, Werner Heisenberg begins to develop a theory based on wave mechanics while trying to make sense of this new universe, and realizes that something went wrong when you tried to measure the position and velocity of a particle at the same time. No matter what you did, you couldn’t simultaneously measure a particle’s position and velocity.

Here, you can infer that the person making the measurement interferes with the experiment; that is, it affects the experiment. This was the explanation of the double slit experiment. But Heisenberg’s inference was that the impossibility of measuring these two states simultaneously, velocity and position, was an…