Demystifying the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle 

So entertaining, that ending line is gold ❤ Shout out to the editing team 👏🏼

I am fascinated not by the content (although I am), but the fact that physics knowledge is now made available to the masses thanks to Internet and the dedication of people like Don. We are entering a golden era.

As an Electrical Engineer with a PhD in Statistical Signal Processing it is great to finally see a video on major youtube channel addressing the connection between Fourier Analysis and the Uncertainty principle. I learned about this connection many years ago in my PhD when studying time-frequency representation, Gabor transform, etc. For those who don't know, today time-frequency representations are the common (2D-, image-like) inputs of speech recognition systems like Alexa and Siri. The minimum resolution of the spectrogram (one type of time-frequency representation) in time and frequency is controlled by what is the signal processing parallel of the uncertainty principle. Signal Processing is a wonderful field of study that is often overlooked.

Wow! It appears it's possible to explain the Heisenberg principle without a trace of mysticism and mysterious music😂 loved it!👍

the demo of sines making squares is how additive synthesizers work in a music context as well. if you add enough sine waves in the right way at the right frequencies, you can replicate all kinds of other sounds (wave shapes). this was unexpected and cool to see in this video!

Dr. Don showing his humorous side, I like it. I also like the clarity in the math even though I still have little understanding of math at this level.

That was incredibly well done.

Best explanation of Fourier analysis as used in physics. Thank you.

no uncertainty here: physicist effortlessly explains both Heisenberg and Fourier with such ease for common folks like me... thank you!

Loving your videos, Don. Thanks very much! I was struggling to keep up a bit at steps 3 and 4, but I will watch this again until I 'get it'.

Glad you're still making videos Don! Thanks for this one

Great explanation of the underlying relationship between position and momentum. Thanks for putting this together!

If RU-vid had been around, with content like this, when I did my physics degree, my life would have been so different!

Thank you!! It feels truly amazing when all dots are connected. Physics is indeed everything.

Brilliant everytime, Uncle-Don makes me happy and I learned something again! Been hooked since lockdown#1, I just need a linear-accelerator to test all this stuff out on! 🙂 Great, 10stars.!

Btw the modulation of the sine wave to produce a square one is exactly the principle behind the dalek voices and many audio fx with what is called a ring modulator

Great appreciation for you sir, and for all of your dedicated team. You have greatly contributed to doubling down on my relative perspective on the rest of the creation. Infinity is man made word, but a very real topic.

Best explanation of uncertainty theory yet ever. Thank you!

Kudos to the editor. Great work on the ending.

One of the best explanations of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Much appreciated.

Police officer: "Did you know you were driving 100 km per hour?!" Driver: "Great, now I'm lost!"

The Fourier Transformation is what got me interested in delving deeper into the math. I had learned about it in the early 80's when taking electronics. This has clarified so much. Thanks

You cooked up a great episode there!

Thank you, Dr. Lincoln, for a _beautifully_ done video addressing the very heart of where the uncertainty principle comes from! Also, for folks who may find the idea of a Fourier transform a bit intimidating, think of an old-style radio station dial: Each number is a location on your dial, but it also represents a sine wave (the carrier frequency) that could be thousands of miles long. Your radio dial is a Fourier transform of carrier frequencies from all your local stations, compressed into tiny packages on the space of your dial. Particles aren't that different.

Another wonderful video, with Dr LIncoln again on top form. I look forward to watching more. 10/10.

3Blue1Brown did a video on the uncertainty principle as well if you are looking for an accessible deeper dive into the math. These two videos complement each other nicely - it's worth watching both.

Thank you again sir for a wonderful and clear intro to a difficult subject. I may watch this with my students when we investigate how metaphysics schools epistemology and epistemology schools metaphysics.

Congratulations on your good taste in not having any lousy advertisements in your video. I recently had a computer problem that caused my ad block software to quit working, and consequently I've unsubscribed to channels that have too many ads in their videos.

ur videos are simply the best. Thank u dr lincoln 🙏🙏

Your videos is perfect. I'm gonna recommend it to my students along our chemistry class. Brilliant.

Genuinely amazing how you can simplify all this. Its almost harder than the maths itself to be able to explain this in a digestible manner.

Brilliant! Thank you Doctor Heisendon. I somewhat get it after a lifetime of not getting it.

This video connected so many topics for me, uncertainty principle, normal distributions, fourier transform 🤯

Thank you for this presentation of a fundamental bit of theory. I'm well versed in Fourier and LaPlace transforms but never studied the higher-up physics courses. I've enjoyed other Fermilab videos, but this one got me to press that "Subscribe" button.

Such a elegant explanation of concepts. Thanks

I love these videos. They almost make me want to study math again.... almost. But seriously. Thanks for making these. They're awesome.

The postlude is so cool!

Professor: What's this section of the wave called? Me: ...a wiggle Professor: Get out.

Dr. Lincoln puts out the best science videos, in my opinion. He describes the phenomena very clearly, he presents it in a more-or-less easy to understand way (how easy to understand can quantum physics EVER get??), and I always feel like I understand the world a little better after watch8ing one of his videos.

This is a great video. Even I was able to follow along well enough to extract info and enjoy it.

Who else needs a demystifying video for this video.

That physics is everything... gives me goosebumps

That was absolutely a WONDERFUL video!! Thank you

An awesome explanation for a motivation for the HUP…not to be confused with a proof but extremely illuminating….that shows how deeply the structure, strands and connections in Math determine the structure of reality and the universe as well👏👏👏🙏🙏

Everyone wants to see Dr. Don dress up as Heisenberg for Halloween now.

A master piece of an episode!

Funny that, when I started watching this channel, I was in high school wanting to study particle physics. Now I'm having Quantum Mechanics A classes in masters degree course

Thank you Dr. Lincoln (genius is when a complicated subject is expressed in a simple manner).

You got so close to saying what people actually need to know. Uncertainty is a fundamental property of all wave mechanics.

A very good visual representation of converting a wave to a 'flat' line box or grid system, which is used all the time in electronics.

Luís Ferreira, walks through stargates, and your use of clip nerded me out, as he spoke the name. Some generous z axis thoughts. Deeper when higher.

Dig the hat and this is just mind-boggling for me. Maths are not my forte by any stretch but for some reason I am drawn to these videos and yours are some of the best. So though I will never understand this I certainly will be intrigued by them. Thanks.

This is SO CLEAR, thank you very much. I would appreciate very much a similar explanation on something that is very obscure and rarely explained: the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Would you? 🙂 So many thanks.

Absolutely brilliant. I finally get it!

Another thumbs up for the music and the whole end scene 👍

Wow! More than excellent explanation!!!

Thanks for the links ❤

THANK YOU... PROF. DR. LINCOLN...!!!

The new production on this channel is much better (with graphs, animations and stuff), makes things easier to understand.

It only checks out with GR/SP, even m-Theory/Super String or others don't have such inviolable room for both knowing p and location. Even w/ GR/SP it only checks out above quantum level, and definitely breaks down with v >= c. IF neutrinos' v == c, well it is the case that disproves Uncertainty Principle; because IF anything can move >= c, it had to be accelerated to that: even 'coming into existence' via decay processes etc, its imparted and has to check out with values for decay elements. Its really an artifact of our 'flawed' instruments: they're all based on physical observations or ultimately instruments designed around chemical processes at subluminal speeds, electrons powering the instruments v < c; fundamentally the instruments can't ever observe properly a v > c object.

Thanks , this is really good 💐

I needed that. Thank you.

Congratulations, was a real fun video.

Great job Don!!

awesome, many thanks, I now understand something so fundamental... that is great.

Another classic thank you.

Thank you dr Don!!

Tiank you for this! Its now clearest!!!

Pls make a video on uncertainty of energy and time also. Thank you

Another Don Lincoln banger

A more intuitive explanation would use the delta-E * delta-T version of the uncertainty principle. The energy of a particle (let's say a photon) is directly proportional to its frequency (and inversely to its wavelength). The "uncertainty" in time is the duration of time over which we observe the energy. NOW - think of this as playing a note, shorter and shorter and shorter. The frequency of the note is the energy. The longer the note is played, the more certain we are of the energy. But as it gets shorter and shorter, eventually the duration is too small to even begin to discern the frequency (energy). This is most easily demonstrated with sound software, as most musical instruments play notes clearly for far longer than where the "uncertainty" comes into play. If you shorten the duration of a perfect sinusoidal wave to less than half a wavelength, you don't get a note so much as a "click". That "click" is the white noise of having a sharp spike (the narrow bell curve in the video, with the "w" curve becoming very wide). There's not much more to it than that: everything at the quantum level essentially IS A WAVE, not just sorta-kinda, but IS. Because it's all waves, this "note vs duration" logic applies everywhere, and we call it "The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle". I would rather call it the "There are only waves, no particles" principle.

Looking good Doc

It’s impressive that you explained this without summations or limits, sometimes you just want to learn without doing too much math or reading proofs.

That was understandable even with the math. Thanks Dr!

Loving the slightly different format.

As you brought up de Broglie, I'd like to point out ðat his and Bohm's *Pilot Wave Þeory* does allow violating ðe Uncertainty Principle. In PWÞ, each particle has a definite position and speed at all times. From ðe mere starting condition, not law, ðat ðe Bayesian probability distribution of ðe particles be equal to |ψ|^2 (quantum equilibrium) follows ðat we can't *know* boþ position and momentum beyond a fixed uncertainty. Ðe Fourier stuff concerns ðe wave function and has noþing to do wið uncertainty; ðe wave is in a perfectly definite state at all times. Uncertainty comes into play only once you *interpret* ðe wave as encoding mere probabilities. Ðe non-basic nature of ðe UP is shown in PWÞ by ðe fact ðat if you have an ensemble of particles in a narrow enough non-equilibrium distribution, you can measure position and momentum to arbitrary precision, as Antony Valentini shows in *Subquantum Information and Computation* .

Oh my god, I actually understand it now! I'm an electronics guy myself, so I understand the Fourier transform I always viewed the W space as just the histogram of frequencies, I'm very familiar with this, and how it relates to shape of the sound vawes for example. Before this video I understood the delta x, every video explains this bit. But none of the videos I viewed explained that the distribution on the w space, which is fourier transform, determines the momentum. That was the missing bit. Thank you! It feels so satisfying to finally understand this 😅

Heisenberg's hat and beard are very becoming to you! FFT is everything. I used it intensively (Signal Acquisition, FFT-Programming, Data-Processing) for my PhD on Super - Conductors.

Thanks Sir 👍

Loved it!

Well that went straight over my head, but I really enjoyed the guitar outro 👌

6 hours in and only 24 ,000 views. There is no uncertainty about your popularity. ✨

Heisendon haha what a great video and thankyou for leaving the tasty math in the description. One day I wish to get a degree in physics but I feel I need to study more, atleast the universe is a beauty to study one cannot complain!

I am going back to my teenage years, over 70 years ago. My friend's father who was an engineer one day sat me down to explain the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, by telling me it was impossible to measure a bathtub of water as the moment a thermometer was inserted the energy would shift from the bath to the thermometer. I never understood it, but I have never forgotten it. His own two sons took off.

It might be a good idea to go over what both the Planck Constant and the Reduced Planck Constant were originally used for and why, as well as to take a look at where students frequently get confused about which one they should use.

Congratulations!!!!

Thanks again.

Sur, you are an inspiration for me.

difficult to explain simply nice work

Great teacher

great video!!

I got into mathematics and number theory through the equations of quantum mechanics and relativity via the whole idea of Fourier transformations... which led me to the Riemann hypothesis, which my brain has been orbiting ever since... and not just because I could use the prize money.

These videos are a gift, really love them. As an electrical engineer, there is one aspect of wave functions that puzzles me: Photons are governed by Maxwell, all particles with mass by Schroedinger’s equation. Shouldn’t they be highly related?

I always imagined the Heisenberg principle in relation to Energy. As the energy of a particle is inversely proportional to its wavelength, I imagined the measurement of the place of a particle as putting it in a grid of certain length, like a sieve. If it falls through the sieve, it‘s smaller than the sieve‘s openings. But if it fits through, its wavelength also has to be shorter than the sieve‘s opening, meaning that its energy gets higher and higher until it destroys the sieve instead of passing through.

LOVE YOU GUYS

@Fermilab we know that all atoms vibrate and at very low temperatures these vibrations are exactly what stops atoms from reaching absolute zero. Can we ever reduce an atom’s vibrations below the Planck length? What would be the consequences of doing this? Now consider neutron stars and black holes. As the pressure on individual particles increases, their vibrations must get restricted below the Planck length. Is there any relationship between restrictions on the vibrations of particles due to pressure, and the formation of neutron stars vs black holes?

Thank you 🎇🌌

As a chemist I can only remind our host that physics is the science of approximating a horse usin a sphere. I will note that since h-bar/2 is an insanely small number, we can generally determine position and momentum to a reasonable degree of precision, especially for objects of high mass. This is especially handy in that it prevents you from making the unpleasant discovery that your car is suddenly in the oncoming lane of traffic.

much appreciated - and enjoyed :) i think i even understood something for the first time on this h..berg

then explain the fact we know the speed and position if the center of a black hole. Thanks - really like you channel.