Epstein Secrets

but it does not.) HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016007 318 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet? Uncertainty If youknow alittle of quantum mechanics you might imagine Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle comes to our rescue. Heisenberg’s principle is often misunderstood. People sometimes try to explain it as an experimental pr

n to our classical certainty? What is the state of the cat before I - a sentient observer — open the box? Was the result of the decay measured by the Geiger counter, the cat, or are we waiting for someone to open the box and observe the result? The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics — named a

to reach for a gun every time he hears mention of it. The thought experiment works like this. A cat is put in a box with a radioactive substance, a Geiger counter and a vial of poison. If the counter detects a radioactive decay it breaks the bottle and the cat dies, if no decay is detected the cat lives

, he polished off his ideas about the quantum behavior of atoms and sent it off to Born, who submitted it for publication. You may be familiar with Heisenberg's name, not least because of the 2P_Glealer-StoryEverTold_Atirdd B4 12/16116 3:06 PIA EFTA00286006 A Universe Stranger than fiction 85 famous

t least three children with various mistresses, and whose wave equation is the most famous icon of quantum mechanics. Instead I will focus first on Heisenberg, or rather not Heisenberg himself, but instead the result that made his name famous: the Heisen- berg uncertainty principle. This is often interpret

But even closer to home, relativistic time dilation has an impact. We on Earth are all bombarded every day by cosmic rays from space. If you had a Geiger counter and stood out in a field, the counter would click at a regular rate every few seconds, as it recorded the impact of high-energy particles c

but in this case it is the momentum of the particle that is related to the frequency of the probability wave associated with the particle. Hence, Heisenberg's uncertainty relation: If we want to localize a particle over a small region, i.e., have the width of the highest peak in its wave function as nar

it in Japan, so 2P_Glealer-StoryEverrold_Atirdd 142 12/16116 3:06 PIA EFTA00286064 Desperate Times and Desperate Measures 143 the problems of Heisenberg's proposal were already clear to him. Then in 1934 Yukawa read Fermi's theory of neutron decay, which catalyzed a new idea in Yukawa's mind. Perhap

en- tored him throughout the rest of his career. Bothe was spectacularly lucky to be mentored by Planck and, shortly thereafter, by Hans Geiger, of Geiger counter fame. Geiger, in my mind, is one of the most talented experimental physicists to have been over- looked for a Nobel Prize. Geiger had begun