In 1924 de Broglie proposed that all matter has a wave associated with it, and this was quickly confirmed for electrons by diffraction experiments. In 1926 Schrödinger, in his classic wave equation — aided importantly by Born — replaced the picture of an electron as a particle having a precise position and momentum as it orbits a nucleus with a wave function that predicted stationary waves of electron probability around the nucleus. Schrödinger's equation enables physicists to calculate not the location of an electron at any given moment but its probability of being at any particular point in space. … the electron becomes a probability wave in the Schrödinger/Born model.
Then in 1927 Heisenberg, in his far-reaching uncertainty principle, proved that the position and momentum of any elementary particle such as an electron can never be measured simultaneously with unlimited accuracy. The more an experimenter tries to pin down the position in space, the greater will be the uncertainty in momentum, and vice versa, because the very act of observing the particle (say by firing a photon at it) will inevitably disturb its position and momentum.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that the uncertainty in the position multiplied by the uncertainty in momentum will always exceed a constant based on Planck's constant h. Other kinds of uncertainty principle may also be derived, such as one which relates the uncertainty in the energy of a particle to the time interval in which one measures the energy.
Blogger Comments:
From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the wave of a particle is its potential, measured in terms of probability, and the particle is the instantiation of that potential, measured in terms of frequency.
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is the probability measure of the meaning being construed viewed from the perspective of the observer who is doing the construing.
No comments:
Post a Comment