> Learning that the uncertainty principle gives rise to phenomena that popular science calls "wave-particle" duality was taught to me in quantum 101. Agreed, j

> Learning that the uncertainty principle gives rise to phenomena that popular science calls "wave-particle" duality was taught to me in quantum 101. Agreed, just to expand on that: The hand-wavey relationship between wave-particle duality and the uncertainty principle was taught to me like this... Imagine you have a sine wave. It has a well-defined momentum, p, given by its wavelength. However, since it's infinitely periodic in space, it has no well-defined position, x. Now consider a wave-packet[1]. This has a very well-defined position, given by the centre of the packet, but no well-defined wavelength/momentum. These are the limiting cases. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, ΔpΔx >= ħ/2, just quantifies this relationship. If you try and measure x, the wavefunction ends up more 'packet-like' and you can no longer measure p as well, and if you try and measure p, the wavefunction ends up more 'wave-like' and you can no longer measure x as well. That's all there is to it. It's not exactly rigorous, but I don't think this explanation is too misleading either (though I'd be happy to learn otherwise!). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_packet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_packet