Understanding the Uncertainty Principle with Quantum Fourier Series | Space Time

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Sometimes intuitive, largescale phenomena can give us incredible insights into the extremely unintuitive world of quantum mechanics. Sign up for your free trial of The Great Courses Plus at

Today the humble sound wave is going to open the door to really understanding Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and, ultimately quantum fields and Hawking radiation.

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One of the most difficult ideas to swallow in quantum mechanics is Werner Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle. It expresses the fundamental limit on the knowability of our universe. We’ve discussed it in our early videos on quantum mechanics, but it’s time we looked a little deeper. See, the apparent weirdness of the uncertainty principle hints at the even weirder underlying reality that gives rise to it. The universe we experience seems to be constructed of singular particles with well-defined properties. But this intuitive, mechanical reality is emergent from underlying reality in which the particles that form matter arise from of the combination of an infinity of possible properties. And forget matter - the vacuum itself is the sum of infinite possible particles. If we fully unravel this idea we’ll be on the verge of tackling things like Hawking radiation. But as you’ll see today, in that unraveling we are led, unavoidably, to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

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