- #1
nonequilibrium
- 1,439
- 2
Hello,
I'm (only) receiving an introduction to Quantum Physics atm, and today our professor argued that the uncertainty principle doesn't have a definite form: the right hand side of the inequality is dependent on the confidence measure/certainty you choose, in other words 95%, 99% certainty, ... So is this true? This would make the general statement [tex]\Delta x \Delta p = O(h)[/tex].
The weird thing: if it is statistical, it means that it can happen that your measurement was more exact than any specific certainty level that you could expect beforehand. I do understand that you can't do it repeatedly, just like the arrow of time is statistical which doesn't mean we can make all the gas in a room collect in a corner any time we want (without expenditure of work...), but the thing is: I remember having read in more than one book that quantum mechanics (or at least certain intepretations of it) take the UP to mean that x and p are actually not defined to an arbitrary certainty level at any given time. But the statistical version of the UP would imply that x and p are always defined to an arbitrary precision, because there always exists a certain chance the uncertainty is smaller than any specific right hand side (chosen beforehand) of the UP.
I'm (only) receiving an introduction to Quantum Physics atm, and today our professor argued that the uncertainty principle doesn't have a definite form: the right hand side of the inequality is dependent on the confidence measure/certainty you choose, in other words 95%, 99% certainty, ... So is this true? This would make the general statement [tex]\Delta x \Delta p = O(h)[/tex].
The weird thing: if it is statistical, it means that it can happen that your measurement was more exact than any specific certainty level that you could expect beforehand. I do understand that you can't do it repeatedly, just like the arrow of time is statistical which doesn't mean we can make all the gas in a room collect in a corner any time we want (without expenditure of work...), but the thing is: I remember having read in more than one book that quantum mechanics (or at least certain intepretations of it) take the UP to mean that x and p are actually not defined to an arbitrary certainty level at any given time. But the statistical version of the UP would imply that x and p are always defined to an arbitrary precision, because there always exists a certain chance the uncertainty is smaller than any specific right hand side (chosen beforehand) of the UP.