Uncertainty principle: Was Heisenberg too pessimistic?
Physicists have cast doubt on the uncertainty principle, a cornerstone of quantum mechanics. Theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg formulated the principle in 1927.
In its most familiar form, it says that it is impossible to measure anything without disturbing it. For instance, any attempt to measure a particle’s position must randomly change its speed.
“We designed an apparatus to measure a property—the polarization—of a single photon. We then needed to measure how much that apparatus disturbed that photon,” says Lee Rozema, a PhD candidate in Professor Aephraim Steinberg’s quantum optics research group at the University of Toronto.
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Photo credit: Dylan Mahler/University of Toronto
Point, Einstein.