4 ms·
> The Uncertainty is not due to finite information. It is an inherent property! That's what they said, though? Although I suppose it could stand to be emphasiz
by a1369209993 4y ago
> The Uncertainty is not due to finite information. It is an inherent property!
That's what they said, though? Although I suppose it could stand to be emphasized more:
Physical quantities that have an uncertainty principle, such as position and momentum, are inherently related to each other by a Fourier transform. At a quantum-mechanical level, position is the Fourier transform of momentum, and vice versa - anything that constrains the position to a narrow interval (including but not limited to measuring it very precisely) inherently also smears momentum over a wide range of possibilities, even it was itself previously tighly constained (and, again, vice versa).
- hgsgm 4y ago
- abstrakraft 4y agoApologies if you consider this pedantic, but I prefer to phrase it in terms of the wavefunctions in position and momentum, rather than position and momentum, unadorned: At a quantum-mechanical level, the wavefunction in the position domain is the Fourier transform of the wavefunction in the momentum domain, and vice versa - anything that constrains the position wavefunction to a narrow interval inherently also smears the momentum wavefunction... Again, apologies if this seems pedantic. I know enough about quantum mechanics to be dangerous, but am no expert, so pedantic wording helps me keep things straight.
- a1369209993 4y ago> Apologies if you consider this pedantic Honestly, if anything I'd say the pedatry goes the other way: pedantically, the wavefunction in the position domain is what a particle's position is (and respectively for momentum); it's making a distiction between the two (or pretending that there's anything in the position domain other than wave functions) that's insufficiently pedantic.