When I was in high school, I didn't like the uncertainty priniciple much when I realized that its implications were more deep than I liked. For several years, I thought about it quite a bit and think that by the time I had studied it at Ohio State University, I really did not like it and determined the best way to resolve the problem was to understand the concept in full. After years of work and thinking into it, I think that I have a complete understanding and have come up with the fallacy in logic for the Heisenberg Principle and am wanting other's input on what they think.
Let me start by briefly explaining the Uncertainty Principle. “The Heisenberg uncertainty principle places limits on the accuracy with which the momentum and the position of a particle can be specified simultaneously. Those limits are not just limits due to faulty measuring techniques. They are fundamental limits imposed by nature, and there is no way to circumvent them (Physics 894)….” Werner Heisenberg determined that to measure something like an atom, you must disturb it, at least a little, with a measuring devise. If we are to determine the position accurately for an electron, we must use a photon that has a short wavelength. This means that photons with high energy are employed. The more energy the photons have, the more momentum they impart to the electron when they strike it, which changes the electron’s motion in an unpredictable way. They attempt to measure accurately the electron’s position introduces considerable uncertainty in its momentum; the act of measuring the electron’s position at one moment makes our knowledge of its future position inaccurate. Suppose, then, that we use photons of longer wavelength. Because that we have lower energy, the momentum of the electron is not so appreciably changed during measurement, but its position will be correspondingly less accurately know (Chemistry 196)….” Heisenberg even developed an equation as to how well that you could measure both at the same time: h/4p £ (x)(Dp) where h is planks constant (6.626X10^-34 Jsec), x is the uncertainty in position, and Dp is the uncertainty linear momentum.

Within several years, I kept realizing that having the capability to understand our environment to a perfect degree on a micro and macro scale was becoming more and more important to me. It seemed as though many of the details that I wanted answers for, including some religious questions depended on it.

About five years ago, I was analyzing Heisenberg’s principle when I realized something. Heisenberg was correct in his solution, but only in measuring with light. The principle was not so grand to speak to the strong implications perceived that people could only know so much. What I realized was that Heisenberg was using one cutting edge tool of his day, light, to solve the basic understanding of light. The way I saw it was that he was using a chainsaw to perform open-heart surgery. It can only be done so well. Heisenberg went further to explain how well it could be done. Where Heisenberg collected his Nobel Prize and left off was that light was an inappropriate tool for performing measurements and a different tool must be used. Light was simply one of the better-understood tools of his day (roughly in 1925).

Let us consider gravity for a moment though. It has special characteristics about it that make it a more useful candidate to measure the atom. To our best understanding, gravity is a by-product of multiple masses existing under specific conditions. Gravity cannot be created, destroyed, or manipulated except by controlling mass. It does not work in the quanta that light does. It is infinitely divisible and infinitely long. By simple definition, it does not exist on its own, but is just a by-product of mass existing. Its equation, Fg=Gm1m2/r^2, where the force of gravity is equal to a gravitational constant multiplied by two masses and divided by the square of the distance between the two masses. Gravity has an added feature of ignoring time and energy that may seep into a measuring contraption.

My goal is not to demonstrate that perfection in construction of the atomic equation has be accomplished, but more so that steps towards a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) should not be hindered and scientists can resume work in the field without objection. We are only at the beginning of scientific understanding of our universe. We are just as close to having an accurate description of the universe as a caveman had understood electricity thousands of years ago. For example, 90% of the mass in the universe is unidentified as matter, anti-matter, or something else. My goal is simply to lift one stop sign that has hindered the scientific community for ¾ a century.

One of the problems that I came across myself is the whole definition of uncertainty itself. If I am adding ten cups of water together and I want to know precisely how much water is in the combined dish, I would need to determine certain criteria of my tools. My measuring devise in this example has markings for ¼ cup on it and I am adding in ten separate cups into a container. I could probably get a good margin of error out of these cups of +/- 1/8 cup every time I pour one cup of water into the large container. By the time that I have all of these cups of water poured into the container, my ending result of error is not 1/8 a cup of water, but 1/8 cup multiplied by ten. I have 10 cups of water plus or minus 1 and ¼ cup of water.

According to Heisenberg’s equation, if we have a freeze an ice cube, we could more accurately determine where in space and time that object is than we could determine where a small block of gold is of the exact dimensions. I have not done the math, but if we were to take the margin of error that Heisenberg allows for in his equation under optimal conditions with precise light tools, it is likely that we would not be able to determine the position and velocity of a gold coin setting still in front of us on a desk whether it was on the desk or setting on the sun just because of the number of particles involved and margins of error are added, not remaining constant.

As I have said, it is not my goal to map the atom, but simply allow other scientists to resume work that has been postponed for nearly a century. Here is a basic design of the tool that will work. Three precise metal plates that are quite super cooled have a very specific mass, composition, and dimensions are placed in a X, Y, and Z directions of a test sample. The test atom or compound is placed within a pretty well known distance from the testing plates. As the subatomic particles move within the atom, the plate is slightly pulled or not so pulled by the gravitational force of the test particle. The amount of force that it takes to replace the plate to its original position in space by using magnetism can be used to calculate the force of gravity of the subatomic particle moving. After several hundred of these tests are completed (depending on the number or particles involved), it is much like solving a multivariable equation. We have a basic idea of the forces involved so we create an list of multivariable equations, plug those into a large matrix and then you will get more information than where one particle was at and how fast it was moving. You get the entire structure equation of the atom or compound with position and velocities of all of the components. At that point, further study can be done to analyze how other factors affect atoms and compounds adding a new field to science, theoretical creation of matter, anti-matter, and so forth. We can have the basic understanding of how it all works in reality.

I am interested in hearing others input

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle corresponds the situation during observation of some objects at the water surface just by surface waves by considering of Brownian motion. It makes the density fluctuations, which are making the shape of objects observed blurry for such waves.

This is classical physic analogy of such "fallacy" by AWT.

This post has been edited by Zephir on Sep 4 2006, 10:14 PM

Wow! You have imagination, don't you?

Let me list the problems I see in your presentation here.

1. Gravitational interaction between the particle and the plates will be overwhelmed by the electromagnetic interactions between them. It will be the error in the 36th digit, because electromagnetic interaction is 36 orders of magnitude stronger.
2. You can't measure exact position of something that does not have such.
3. We still don't know how gravity works. It could turn out that it has quantum structure.

Single electron will pull 1kg plate at distance 1mm with force F=6*10^-35 N. The same electron will push away another electron(not whole plate) at 1mm distance with force F = 2*10^-14 N. Now guess which force you will measure, if you possibly could.
Probably measuring sound of snowflake fall near by taking off airplane will be easier task.

If position and momentum are mutually exclusive how is it that you need position to calculate momentum in the first place? Calculating momentum involves knowing at least an original position ie velocity.

Hi dwaynefries,

To start with, I have a very different opinion of the uncertainty principle. You are stating, if I read you correctly, that there is a true position and momentum of a particle, but that we cannot measure them both simultaneously because of the technical limitations of using light. In other words, the uncertainty principle is not universal nor fundamental.

I see it this way: the uncertainty principle is just a very bad name for a fundamental fact, and the fact is that the universe contains exactly half the information that we classically expect it to contain. We are merely spoiled by living in the world of large objects, and so we expect to be able to "have our cake and eat it too." The universe is not "hiding" information from us; rather, we are falsely expecting to get information that is not really there. As another example, we are like a rich man who has so much money that every time he pulls a dollar out of his wallet, there is still money in the wallet, so he has always a dollar in his hand and a dollar in his wallet. Now he becomes poor and has only one dollar. When he pulls it out, he is puzzled because there is now not a dollar in his wallet anymore. Where did it go? Shouldn't there be a dollar in his hand AND a dollar in his wallet? That's the way it always worked when he was rich! He puts the dollar back, and now he doesn't have a dollar in his hand. Again, he is puzzled; where did the dollar in his hand go? There is some kind of weird "uncertainty principle" that only shows up when you are poor: you can have the dollar in your wallet or the dollar in your hand, but not both. How strange. The universe must be hiding the other dollar from him. Perhaps if he pulls it out gently enough, he will find that there is still a dollar in his wallet too ... no, it didn't work.

The rich man seems very silly, not to understand that a single dollar cannot be in two places at once, but all he is doing is going by his own experience: all his life he has been so rich that there were always many dollars in his wallet and in his hand, and so the either/or behavior of the single dollar never became obvious to him.

Physics is in the same position. We have always previously measured large objects consisting of many particles, and containing much information. There was always enough information in the object to let us specify its position and momentum very accurately, never noticing that there was any conflict between the two measurements. But when we measure a single particle, it has only a single piece of information describing it. Should we choose to look at this information as position? Then the object gives us all the information it has, and it gives it to us in the form of position. It does not have any more information to give, so we cannot also ask its momentum. Similarly, if we choose to look at the information as momentum, we cannot then ask about position. The dollar is either in the wallet or in the hand, and it can't be both places at once, and there are not any "hidden dollars."

My way of expressing it may be a bit unusual, but my opinion is really pretty much in line with the mainstream opinion in physics regarding the uncertainty principle. I just think that people don't take the principle far enough. Calling it "uncertainty" invites misinterpretation, even among physicists. We simply have to get over the idea that there is an unlimited amount of information out there to be measured. The emphasis placed on measurement in most explanations of the uncertainty principle is also very misleading, because it makes the principle into a measurement issue. It is not; it is an information issue. It should really be called the "limited information principle."

It applies to many other measurements besides those done with light. It works just the same for electrons instead of photons, in fact it works just the same for any particle, because all particles obey the deBroglie relation relating their momentum to their wavelength. There are even experiments that measure properties of particles indirectly WITHOUT INTERACTING WITH THE PARTICLE AT ALL. This is even better than your gravity idea, and it still turns out that you can't beat the uncertainty principle. There are many different experimental ways of measuring position and momentum, and they all fail in apparently different ways, but all obey the uncertainty principle. When you see repeated failures, when every experiment fails in its own way, but all fail by the same degree, you start to suspect very strongly that something deeper is going on. Either there is a conspiracy by the universe to make each experiment fail, and by some vast coincidence we are cheated out of knowing both position and momentum, or else there is no conspiracy and no coincidence at all, and the experiments fail, each in its own way, because there are trying to do the impossible: measure information that ISN'T THERE. In that case, there is no mystery -- of course they fail, and of course each fails differently because each tries differently to do the impossible.

Well, that's my opinion on the uncertainty principle. Here is a link to further ranting on this topic in a post I made to another thread on physorg:

Uncertainty Rant

Although I disagree with you, it is interesting to discuss this topic. Thank you.

--Stuart Anderson[COLOR=blue]

mr_homm
I do appreciate the feedback as it is the closest to feedback of anysort that I have yet received on the topic.
I can accept the philosophy that there is a universe conspiricy theory that prevents us from knowing all the little stuff. I just believe that as humans, we will try to defeate it over and over and over until we are quite sure the conspiricy theory holds up and then we can compensate for that (maybe hide the experiment from the universe-I am really not kidding when I say that)

I am open to the possibility that there are even better ideas of how to disprove the Heisenberg principle than my own (I am not so sure that it is the one that has failed in it attempts though)

I more simply than anything want to demostrate that the Heisenberg makes much too large a jump in stating that we cannot know the atom well because we must use light. The fact that we must use light is like saying that we need to change a tire by using a spoon. Heisenberg has shown that light is a bad choice just like using a spoon as a tool to change a tire is a bad tool for the job. Saying something is impossible is what makes people think-even me-though my wife may disagree at times. Heisenberg did a great job of saying that light was a bad tool for the job, however, he made a leap that was too far in my opinion when he said that light doesnt work so no tool will work in solving the problem because it is impossible.

I can tell that you have actually read all of the work that I have posted and understand it because of this single quote.

People failed repeatedly with flight. The first history of flight, according to the Air Force goes back to ancient greece when people were using feathers and wax and the wax melted by the sun. Despite failures for a couple thousand years, there were two bicycle mechanics that hammered out the kinks and allowed for the evolution and growth into what is now the US Air Force, the space program NASA, and a few other odds and ends. Failures are what defines people-sorry, way off the topic.
We can expect to encounter failures, yeah, that is more subtle. Nothing is expected to be easy, particurally on the magnitude of understanding how the atom works and pushing for the beginning of a science that would replace quantum physics (one of the most recent and sophisticated science known to man)
Even Newtanian Physics was quite the cool thing for a while. It lasted about 500 years.

I do appreciate your time in reading and responding. I dont get much response to the topic.
Thanks
dwaynefries

Perhaps a model of the uncertainty principle may help.
A monophonic audio channel can be modeled as a 1-dimensional time series, where every time has exactly one value of the signal. We ask what the "pure tones" look like, and we get the family of curves
y(t) = A sin(B t + C)
where A and B are the only important qualities on how it sounds. (Helmholtz)

Sheet music tells us What notes to play and When to play them and How Long to play them. In effect, this is like convolving the pure tone with another signal, which is 0 everywhere the note is not being played. Obviously the purest window function is a step function which looks like this:

So the model of "a pure note for a finite time" should look like
y(t) = A sin(B t + C) when t is between D and E, and 0 otherwise.

The note has an uncertainty in time, because D < E, but it should be well-defined in frequency, right? Well, not exactly.

Using Fourier techniques, we can model the finite note in terms of the infinite duration pure sine curves and we discover that the there is an uncertainty in frequency, and the closer D gets to E, the bigger the uncertainty of the frequency gets. Indeed, this is true no matter what shape the window takes. If the window is the shape of a Gaussian Bell curve, the product of the RMS uncertainty of the frequency times the RMS uncertainty of the time is minimized and the product is equal to 1/2. This is a conspiracy of math.

http://www.ams.org/featurecolumn/archive/uncertainty.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-time_Fourier_transform

By mr_homm's view there is a separate conspiracy of the universe so that delta-x * delta-p >= h-bar/2 and delta-E * delta-t >= h-bar/2. What modern quantum physics does is to use math so that all three conspiracies are the same.

This post has been edited by rpenner on Sep 5 2006, 08:36 PM

No one has addressed Fries main position, which is, I may summarize as being Anti-Scientific Stagnation: the reanalysis of defining experiments using techniques and tools benefited from 70 years of scientific development and understanding.

No body has ever been hurt for opposing the mainstream beliefs, except for maybe several burnings.

The danger of theoretical physics lies in becoming emancipated from real experiments. Mathematics is a means to an end and too often it is forgotten that is only a tool. Using it to simply describe itself in a perpetuating circle of logic without being tied to actual observations, is foolish, regardless of its prevalence.

Get out of your Grecian armchairs and instead of pontificating ad nauseum about absolute paradigms, wax creative and experiment and collect data on phenomena to challenge your much coveted dogma.

Ideologies should inspire, not inhibit.

I do like how you resumerized my point lowercase. 70 years of technology is quite a difference in tools. We have developed several kinds of light bulbs in the process as well as this thing called a computer. The radio is not even quite the same as it use to be. We can afford to just throw them out and get a new one versus going to the local hardware store and finding the correct vacuum tube to repair the one we have.

Much of the issues that hinders physics in my view lies in two areas. One is ego and the other is the lack of importance in society. Physists appear to have a need to make a need for themselves. In many cases, they are fosterd to believe that if they make a mistake that others can point out, they will loose all credibility for their opinions. Many scientists have had this philosophy and because of it, had no assistance on developing the concept fully. Others who have stated their opinions and recanted, like Hawkings stating that nothing can escape a black hole, and more recently stating that things can, that has not hurt his reputation. I think it shows him more of a scientist interested in the truth than his own reputation, a stronger scientist.
The second area is the lack of importance in physics today. Physics pays great, but you need to be rolling out the next automobile or airplane for money. There is no money in developing a time machine or developing the science behind extracting all the gold in our universe or another planet. Despite the fact that science missions could be developed with side kicks attached to mine uranium and platenium from the moon to pay for the science exploration of the moon, there is a lack of planners and explorers available on the planet Earth to make one solid goal come true.
you are right about idologies.

I have made strong attempts at providing an action of experiment rather than simply posting blogs. Again, we run into much ordeal with the physicsts mentality of needing a background and experience under my belt before concepts have taken credibility.
I am currently working on an engineering physics degree. I think I will be quite the different type of scientist than most out there today. I am interested in the advancement of our physics that can answer some basic questions in physics. I dont mind being wrong to get there. I will tell you a story:
I once developed a concept independantly of how to create a renewable energy source that had no polution. I came up with my own term for it. I went over and over with people of how it was going to work and be a great thing. People approached me with flaws that would make it not work and in the process, I hammered out quite a few problems that would make it work beyond those problems. Several years after all of this work, one professor handed me a sheet of paper explaining to me that solar collector plants already existed. I was estatic because I saw that the idea that I had was working in real life. I was not disappointed that I was not the first to build the machine. The idea that I thought was my own was already 20 years ahead of schedule. The process of developing the machine myself had led me in a solid direction though. I developed two significant advances in the solar collector that will 1) allow it to be mass produced at a significantly cheaper cost-somewhere on the order of a 1000 times cheaper and 2) any money that someone would want to spend to make the machine get more bang for its buck, well, I developed a componet idea that will make it massively more efficient to work under the dullest of conditions.
I was not disappointed that I was not the first to design it. The independant thought process in the concept allowed for the device to have a stronger performance with my thought process. I also had to learn how such a machine works in solid detail better than I could in any classroom, along with the machines limitations.

The uncertainty principle really speaks to the measurement problem.

How do you measure the position of something, without disturbing its momentum?

You need to shoot something with negligible momentum at it and read the bounce back.

That negligible momentum carrier (the messenger particle) cannot be disturbed on the way.

The problem is what if the measured particle is at rest to begin with? Then after measurement, it must have some momentum related to the momentum of the messenger particle.

Hi Simulus,
I was recently refered to this article in Wikipedia for adressing uncertainty as you just have. Let me know what you think,
Take care,
Ron

Quote from Wiki:

"Common incorrect explanation
The uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics is sometimes erroneously explained by claiming that the measurement of position necessarily disturbs a particle's momentum. Heisenberg himself may have initially offered explanations which suggested this view. That this disturbance does not describe the essence of the uncertainty principle in current theory has been demonstrated above. The fundamentally non-classical characteristics of the uncertainty measurements in quantum mechanics were clarified by the EPR paradox which arose from Einstein attempting to show flaws in quantum measurements that used the uncertainty principle. Instead of Einstein succeeding in showing uncertainty was flawed, Einstein guided researchers to examine more closely what uncertainty measurements meant and led to a more refined understanding of uncertainty. Prior to the publication of the EPR paper in 1935, a measurement was often visualized as a physical disturbance inflicted directly on the measured system, being sometimes illustrated as a thought experiment called Heisenberg's microscope. For instance, when measuring the position of an electron, one imagines shining a light on it, thus disturbing the electron and producing the quantum mechanical uncertainties in its position. Such explanations, which are still encountered in popular expositions of quantum mechanics, are debunked by the EPR paradox, which shows that a "measurement" can be performed on a particle without disturbing it directly, by performing a measurement on a distant entangled particle. Heisenberg's original argument used the 'old' quantum theory (namely, the Einstein-deBroglie relations) and provided a heuristic argument that the position and momentum observables were not simultaneously observable with infinite precision. The more modern uncertainty relations deal with independent measurements being done on an ensemble of systems."

Dear Ron,

Thanks for the link. I guess I might be too 'old school' but I am open to the new view as well.

Spin is a weasly example for these paradoxes. What does entangled position mean?

Position measurement is a physical process. Energy must be consumed in this process, and some momentum is inevitably transfered.

I'd be pleased if someone could confirm my 'view' that the Uncertainty Principle assumes ( is this an assumption?) a Gaussian (normal) distribution of values about the mean value .. Planck's constant being chosen to match 1 standard deviation so (statistically) 68.26% of measurements will fall within the stated 'uncertainty' assuming (of course) that Planck's constant is the only source of 'uncertainty'.

Am I right?

Many thanks,

-C2.

Naturally if you measure an object using something which causes it to move, of course you can't get a position because in trying to find it, you caused it to move.

whilst everyone was formulating theories of quantities of energy, everybody forgot to quantisise time.

And there is a consequence.

The theory of quantum time:

As energy, time comes in packets. Inbetween these packets, a condition exists where there is no time.
Consequently nothing in the universe moves in this condition. Which means that in the condition of no-time, all objects in the universe (because they cannot move) have a precise location and a velocity of 0.

The heisenberg uncertainty principle is nullified because it is impossible to determine an obect's postion in the condition of no-time using waves (cause there is no capacity for change thus the waves can't travel so they can't interact with the object to move it)

Someone needs to invent some mathematics that can extrapolate a precise position from the errors produced by experiments.

This post has been edited by matmilne on Oct 21 2006, 11:50 PM

I am a high school senior and have to make a model of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. First of all I am having difficulty understanding what it is exactly and next how would I make a model of it. I found the discussion quite interesting. I am trying to figure this out if anyone has any insight it would be appreciated.