Wacky Physics: New Uncertainty About the Uncertainty Principle

Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Senior Writer

Date: 25 February 2012 Time: 10:34 AM ET

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The uncertainty principle posits, for instance, that if you make a measurement to find out the exact position of an electron around an atom, you will only be able to get a hazy idea of how fast it's moving. CREDIT: Dreamstime View full size image

One of the most often quoted, yet least understood, tenets of physics is the uncertainty principle.
Formulated by German physicist Werner Heisenberg in 1927, the rule states that the more precisely you measure a particle's position, the less precisely you will be able to determine its momentum, and vice versa.
The principle is often invoked outside the realm of physics to describe how the act of observing something changes the thing being observed, or to point out that there's a limit to how well we can ever really understand the universe.
While the subtleties of the uncertainty principle are often lost on nonphysicists, it turns out the idea is frequently misunderstood by experts, too. But a recent experiment shed new light on the maxim and led to a novel formula describing how the uncertainty principle really works.

MORE: http://www.livescience.com/18567-wacky-physics-heisenberg-uncertainty-principle.html

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